


To Find My Soul

by ElisabethMonroe



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Body Horror, Halloween, Horror, M/M, Monsters, Vampires, but come on they're monsters, just what they eat, no forest creatures were harmed in the making of this story, okay this is done to the characters, the graphic violence isn't done to the characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:40:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27066535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElisabethMonroe/pseuds/ElisabethMonroe
Summary: In which:Adam breaks down and seeks shelter where he should not(A monster story)Into the woods I go, to lose my mind and find my soul
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 45
Kudos: 58





	1. Take Care How You Cut Yourself

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted this to be a horror story but I had too much fun and it shows, I think

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Title from Dracula (like, all of them)

Adam stared incredulously at the gas meter in the dashboard of his car. He’d filled up not an hour ago at the last station for ages. He’d had three quarters of a tank fifteen minutes ago. He reached for his phone and yanked it across the car, catching the charger on the gear shift, which only pissed him off more. He tried to open the maps app he hadn’t really been listening to-- _part of the journey is getting lost_! Blue added unhelpfully in his head--and unsurprisingly there was no reception. It still thought he was forty minutes back the other direction.

Theoretically, he could walk along the road until he found a bar of reception. The only problem was that he was definitely speeding through the straight-shot forest road and forty minutes back was well over sixty miles. It would take a whole day, assuming he could even walk that long. Who knew how much further he had to go before he hit the next town. He’d gotten tired of scrolling through the app screen on his phone before he found the end of the forest. And even if he could find reception and call for help, he’d either have to wait in the elements and hope he could be found or walk all the way back to his car.

He could hope someone chanced upon him, but he hadn’t seen another car for at least half an hour and there were no sounds of civilization when he kicked his door open. The only real hope he had was the winding driveway he’d passed a few minutes ago. He’d barely paid any attention to it. It looked more like a service road no one had used since donkeys were the lay of the land.

But it was really his only sure hope. So he grabbed his bag and packed some essentials--wallet, water bottle, useless cellphone, coat--and started to hike back to the driveway, locking his car against intruders that didn’t seem to exist.

It was a cool fall day and the walk went faster than he thought it would. He supposed the wind at his back and the straight line helped. He kept getting distracted by the towering trees above him and the rustling of their leaves, the scattering of the sunlight between them with each sway. He had always felt drawn to forests. He grew up just outside sprawling greenery and looming mountains, but he’d been too busy for his entire life to really appreciate any of it.

Right now, he had few other options.

The driveway appeared as if through a mist, though there was no mist in the area, or even the slight promise of a mist. The cool dead of day, the warm sunlight, the dry ground. He slipped through the grand gate set a few meters off the road without having to touch the ancient metal. The last thing he needed was tetanus. The driveway was winding and the vegetation on either side was thick, some of it even prodding up through the dirt drive. Through the trees and vines and bushes, he could see small buildings and the longer he walked, the sooner he realized they were barns. Metal barns, wooden barns, large ones, small ones, some that almost looked like miniature houses.

For all the staring, Adam almost walked straight into the front door. He stumbled back from a grand front porch and looked up at an elegant, imposing Virginian farmhouse. It was several stories tall with a cupola or two near the top and a lovely wrap around porch on the third floor. The overhanging roofs on each story provided plenty of shade on each outdoor sitting area or balcony. There almost seemed to be towers reaching into the sky, like a castle, but Adam was sure it was just a trick of the sun.

He jumped up the few stairs to the porch and cross to the door, knocking on it firmly but politely. While he waited, he looked at the lush vegetation again. It was by no means cultivated. It really was just as the property seemed to have always been. Maybe the bushes were planted and then set free. It seemed like good soil. It’d be a good spot for a garden.

He could see fencing in the distance, most of it pulled down or overtaken by vines. He thought it might’ve been cattle fencing, but there were no animals now.

In the far back of behind, there was a forest, dense as the rest that Adam had driven by. The tree line was almost immediately dark and Adam couldn’t make out very much about how wild or tamed it was. He supposed if the immediate property wasn’t tamed, there was no reason the forest should be. It was as good a forest as any to do what needed to be done. He’d have preferred the security of a forest he knew, a cabin he’d rented and a place to come back to, but beggars with shitty cars couldn’t be choosers.

He scratched at his neck to settle the sudden urge to run into the trees, then knocked on the door again. Maybe no one was home. Maybe no one lived here at all. He checked his phone and found no service still, which didn’t seem to suggest there was a person living here with a cell phone service amplifier. 

He was just taking a deep breath to knock again when the door opened. He couldn’t say if it creaked open or swung open. It seemed like one moment it was shut and the next he was looking at a tall, handsome, dangerous man.

The man was Adam’s age. Or he looked it at any rate. He had a shaved head, but a thick buzz cut with a good hairline. His bone structure was sharp enough to cut, from his cheekbones to the fingers curled around the side of his door, to the collar bones that showed above his tank top and the hip bones that protruded against the thin material of his pants. He had dark, but pale skin. Like a book that had been left in the sun for too long. Pallid, maybe, but there was nothing weak about him. He was a man Adam could easily cut himself on and the hackles on the back of his neck warned him against it.

The man had ice blue eyes, so light that Adam thought he was blind, except for the way they flickered along with Adam’s every shift and movement. Those eyes were eating him alive without either of them introducing themselves. Blue glass. More things he could cut himself on.

He was taller than Adam, which wasn’t entirely unusual, but not entirely common. He just happened to wear his height well with long limbs and drawn features. He knew he was imposing, even leaning against his door.

“Who the fuck are you?” the man finally asked. Old money dripped from his voice. But...so did sleep. Adam blushed as he realized he’d intruded and woken the man up.

“I’m sorry. I was driving through and--”

“I don’t do pictures of the property,” the man interrupted. “Goodbye.”

“No! That’s not… Is that a common request?” At the man’s blank stare and the slowly shutting door, Adam continued. “I just mean, I broke down and I need to borrow gas. Or use your phone.”

The man stared at Adam, narrowed eyes making his face even angrier and more angular. “I don’t have anything for your car. But you can come in and try the phone. It works when it wants. Everything out here does.”

Adam almost let out a breath. The man stepped into his house and Adam followed. The door shut on its own behind them.

“My name’s Adam,” he greeted. “And I’m very thankful that you’re helping me out. I don’t know what I’d do. I made sure I was full, but I must’ve sprung a leak or something.”

The man shrugged in front of him and led Adam into a large parlor and then an actual rotary phone on the wall. “There are tricks and mysteries in the trees out here,” he said. “You know how to use one of these?”

Adam stared at it skeptically. “I mean, sure. But...why do you have it?”

“It’s always been in the house. I don’t use the phone a lot, so I didn’t bother replacing it. Most everything in here is original.”

Adam blinked and then reached for the phone. As he touched it, a loud crack of thunder shook the house and he jumped away so quickly, the receiver clattered against the wall.

“Damnation,” the man cursed, looking out the nearest window. “That’ll probably do it for reception. The rain is awful to the old wiring.”

“But it’s not--” Adam started and followed the man’s eyeline to fine sheets and sheets of rain coming down. “It was...clear blue skies while I was outside. How…?”

“Summer showers. Sometimes even the sky can’t stand the Virginia heat,” the man said. “You’ll have to stay. I won’t let you out in this,” he said.

Which was nice enough. But it truly did not sound like an invitation. It sounded like imprisonment.

But what choice did Adam have? Go drown himself? He hated getting wet.

“Thank you. I didn’t get your name,” he tried, instead of arguing.

“Ronan. Ronan Lynch. Come here. These storms usually last a few hours. You’ll want to spend the night, I reckon. No sense sleeping in your car while you wait for help. I’ll show you a room.”

Adam felt terrible at the thought, his hackles raised and irritating, but there seemed to have sprung no new choice in ten seconds, so he followed after Ronan Lynch. The house was as grand inside as it seemed outside, but Adam kept catching glimpses of personality. Pictures on the wall of little boys--one Adam could swear was Ronan’s son, except it was much too old to even be Ronan himself. Then handmade knick knacks and jars of preserved flowers and books with spines cracked so badly from rereads that the pages were no longer attached and hung a few centimeters out on all sides.

As strange as Ronan Lynch was, this was a home.

“How long have you lived here?” Adam asked.

Ronan cocked his head and faltered for half a step before saying, “All my life. It’s a family home. It’s always been ours.”

Adam nodded and tried to imagine a family history that spanned back to the building of this house. He didn’t even consider his own parents a legacy. Having something so real and concrete felt like an impossible dream, but also so very imprisoning. He wondered if Ronan was lonely here, all by himself. He wondered if he felt stuck because this was his family home and he couldn’t leave it.

Then again, it was a grand prison indeed and Adam wouldn’t really complain about it. He was sleeping in a log cabin in the middle of a forest at the moment. It wasn’t even his log cabin.

Ronan led him upstairs without touring the rest of the house. Adam could see a hallway leading away from the stairs, but the lights were off and he could only make out a few doors and maybe an alcove of some kind. Upstairs, the floor split into two directions with one of the balconies Adam had seen outside directly in front. Rain was pouring down and the sky was a violent grey that had Adam seeking cover without even being out in it. To the left, there were two rooms and to the right, there was another room and a set of closets.

“Blankets and pillows are in the closets. Bathroom and bedroom over there,” Ronan said, gesturing to the left and veering in the direction.

“What’s the other room?” Adam asked.

“None of your concern,” Ronan answered and he didn’t bark it or howl it or shout in any way. It was just a fact to him. Adam still felt a threat under his cool demeanor.

He walked into the bedroom when Ronan opened the door and took a second to look around. Clearly it had been a well loved room at some point. There were scuffs on the floor from years of rearranging the large bed and lovely dresser and study desk, but also dirty words engraved on said desk and water stains on the dresser. The bed had oil stains on the railings where someone might’ve kicked a leg out to sprawl or maybe where an arm hung as someone slept on their stomach. Degs in the walls revealed a series of colors hidden under the forest green on it now.

Adam felt like he was intruding, but when he turned around to offer to sleep on the couch, Ronan was gone. He adjusted the bag on his shoulder and swallowed before moving to the bed. It was firm, unused. Ronan clearly didn’t entertain overnight guests often. At least, not any sleeping in the spare room. The pillows were purely decorative and the blanket scratched at his skin, so he went to the hall closet to get a different set. He’d remake the bed later.

Because he was a terrible person, he tried the door to the last room. It was locked, just as he expected it to be, but he could feel a breeze coming through under the door. He got down on his hands and knees and tried to peer into the room, but there wasn’t enough space to see anything but dusty carpet and maybe part of furniture that matched the room he was staying in.

Then there was a transparent, rotting face staring at him. Adam yelped and jumped to his feet, his hackles standing so on end they actually hurt. A sharp wail broke through the door and Adam quickly scrambled back to his side of the hall. Between one blink and the next, Ronan was at the top of the stairs, glaring between the door and Adam.

“What did you do?” he snapped, face sharp and dangerous.

Adam’s eyes got big and he shrugged. “I was just about to make the bed,” he said, holding up the sheets. “And I heard it when I was about to open my door.” He kicked his door open and shrugged again. “What was it?”

“None of your business,” Ronan growled, again. Then he stood there until Adam slowly retreated into his bedroom. For good measure, he locked the door. Though, really, the lock was so old, it probably didn’t work.

He made the bed to the sound of the storm outside. It had calmed down only a little bit, so there were still big thunder claps that made Adam want to tuck tail and hide under the bed. He didn’t realize how tired he actually was until he collapsed on the bed and every muscle started to ache as his body sank into the blankets. He wrapped himself up in them instead of getting under them and he was asleep before he even knew what he was doing.

He dreamed wildly.

He dreamed that Ronan was in the room, staring at him, all sharp angles and weird lines. He dreamed there was another man with him, blond and young, with a bruised face. They were arguing but Adam couldn’t hear what was happening. It was like he was trapped to the bed in a bubble while the world moved on without him.

He dreamed that the young man came back and held his shoulder as he said, urgently, “Adam Parrish, you must wake up. Wake up. You’ll kill him if you stay like this. He’s usually so good with temptation, unless it’ll hurt him. Wake up.”

Adam tried to focus on the young man’s eyes, but he couldn’t decide if they were blue or white. Every blink felt slow and when he looked down at his own arms, they were covered in hair and his nails were long and pointed.

“Are you listening to me? I can’t stay here much longer. You have to wake up. He’ll eat you alive.”

He dreamed that Ronan was back, lunging at him across the bed in time with a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning that blinded Adam to where Ronan was.

Adam sat bolt upright, fingers clinched in his lap as he panted in breaths. Through the window, sunlight streamed in, full and heavy, no morning greeting. It was well into the afternoon. He’d kicked the blankets off in the night, but was still sweating through his clothes. He realized with a slightly sinking heart that he had no change of outfit.

Adam’s body ached again as he stretched in the bed and dropped his legs over the edge of the mattress. He pulled off his flannel shirt and left it spread out on the bed to dry. The rest of the house seemed quiet and he assumed Ronan was out doing chores on the grand estate. Or at least watching other people do chores. He didn’t know how rich people worked.

He didn’t have a change of clothes, but there was a window and he shoved it open and undressed, leaving his clothes to air-dry from the ledge and the beautiful panes that opened outwards. He took a second to admire the grounds in the late afternoon light, warmth curling around his body pleasantly, a little damp from the storm last night.

He was a little upset to have slept the day away, but he was used to that. Sometimes the exhaustion overtook him and he could sleep for seventeen hours. Clearly Ronan hadn’t had a problem with it. Mostly Adam was concerned that he’d slept so long in someone else’s house. And his car was still out on the road. He needed to try the phone again.

Anxiety curled around in his stomach and he realized he was mostly naked again with a start, so he went to the bathroom to shower and clean up. While the shower warmed, he stared at himself in the mirror. Exhaustion was evident on his face and he could feel the ache of it through his entire body. Even his jaws.

Though, he supposed, that wasn’t too unusual.

He leaned over to wash his mouth out in the sink, letting the cool water soothe his gums. When he spit it back out, it was tinged red.

Also not unusual.

He wiped his lips off and stood up.

Ronan was behind him in the mirror. Adam jumped and turned to face him, realizing too late how close that put them between the opened door and the sink.

“You should watch where you cut--” Ronan stopped when he realized there wasn’t any blood on Adam. “You’re not shaving?” he asked.

Adam snorted despite being so close to Ronan he could feel his breath. “No. My hair’s been growing in so fast and thick since I was a teenager that there’s no point.”

Ronan’s eyes narrowed but he didn’t seem to find anything else to say about it. “You slept all day. I tried to wake you.”

Adam didn’t like how monotone his voice was. _Carefully schooled_ , Blue might say. Like he’d been surprised and had to find a different mask to wear, a different part to play, a different monologue spoken.

“It happens,” Adam said. “I hope I didn’t inconvenience you.”

Ronan shrugged his shoulders and even the simple gesture was stately. “I’d have no use of you during the day.”

“I can work a farm,” Adam said.

Ronan’s answering grin was sharp and he snaked out his tongue to lick over his top lip. “I’m sure you can. The grounds need no help. I wouldn’t have my guest work.”

“I ought to pay for room and board at this point.”

“That’s nonsense. You’re in need. I’m helping. Giving back to the community and the less fortunate. I think it’s called philanthropy.”

Adam hummed and looked back in the mirror. At the angle they were at, he couldn’t see Ronan in the reflection. When he shifted to keep an eye on him, they both seemed to realize his nakedness at the same time.

Ronan stepped out of the bathroom. “I’ll leave you to your activities,” he said lowly, almost in a growl. His eyes were dark when they met Adam’s and Adam couldn’t look away. Somehow, he must’ve reached for the door and closed it as Ronan stepped back towards the stairs.

Adam immediately turned and spit four teeth into the sink. He could see shadows moving under the door, but he couldn’t focus on them as his head swam. He swayed back against the wall and then stumbled into the shower. The hot water slowed the aches in his back, his arms, his legs, but the creaking and cracking of bones under his skin was harder to ignore. It wasn’t late enough in the evening to slip out the steam window above the shower yet, but he wasn’t sure how much more privacy he could get without drawing attention to his shifting body. If Ronan wanted to have him for dinner, there was no way Adam could hide.

As it was, trying to sneak out into unfamiliar woods was dangerous. Not only because he didn’t know what was in those woods, but because he didn’t know if he’d have a door to crawl back into it. He could always leave a window cracked, but that was a lot of hope that Ronan wouldn’t notice that either.

Then again, Ronan had left him alone all day. What are the odds he got snoopier at night?

The water started to turn cold too quickly. There was no reason he should already be turning like this. Usually his body waited at least until dusk. The cold water was not helping. He scrubbed at the hair growing too quickly from his arms and then pulled himself out of the tub, groped for the towel he knew was on the toilet, and staggered back to his room. He fell onto the bed in the towel because there was no sense in ruining his only set of clothes. He kept shoving teeth into the pocket of his flannel and buried his aching face into the familiar fabric afterwards. He tried very hard not to tear the sheets with claws he couldn’t keep short and listened to bones crack and grow and ooze marrow and then snap again. And he tried much harder not to whimper as he waited for nightfall.

The wolf wasn’t evil. It was just a part of his life.

Adam was jowls deep in a deer’s ribcage when something caught his eye that wasn’t the dripping gore he’d thrown all over the trees near him. He looked up, lips pulling back from his teeth in a silent snarl. Ahead of him was a white deer, a sight so unexpected, he stopped snarling and folded himself down on his paws to watch it from behind the much more normal deer in front of him.

It was larger than a normal deer, with horns that spanned more than a man’s height. It was all muscle, broad chested and thick legged. If Adam wasn’t currently swallowing half of a heart, his stomach would growl. But he was sated and too enamored to do anything. The deer wasn’t only white, it was almost glowing and translucent. It moved through the forest gracefully and quietly until Adam lost sight of it. He waited for the imprint of its glow to leave his eyes before diving back into the deer in front of him. He pushed his snout around the snapped bones and shredded lungs until he found the heavy muscles on the other side of the deer’s ribs. He pulled them free and then moved on to the entrails threatening to spill out of the gaping chest wound.

Adam yanked more skin and fur away, down the deer’s stomach until he could sprawl out on the ground and cover his face in meat and food. At first it had been difficult to eat the slimy entrails. It was nothing like Adam was used to seeing. He’d never worked in a butcher’s shop. He didn’t know how the sausage got made. But the hunger had been a powerful thing on his first turn and before the night was over, he’d become used to the slick feeling of tendon and intestine sliding down his throat.

Hunger had been a motivator all his life. He’d had to feed himself from a young age, work until his hands bled with the hope that some neighbor would give him five dollars and he could go find enough food at the five’n’dime to stow away under his bed, or that maybe they’d make him a sandwich while he worked.

He’d had a hunger for other things. For excellence and praise, for love and affection. Some things he went more hungry for. Other things he made his own meals out of.

The hunger of the wolf was nothing compared to those hungers. Ducking into a forest, using a powerful body to get what he needed, was nothing compared to a boy who sometimes slept in the car because his father couldn’t stand to see him in the trailer, and then slept on the softest patch in the backyard because his father started locking the car. 

The wolf was hungry, but Adam had been hungry longer. Sometimes he thought this existence was unfair. He’d asked for it in probably the same measure the deer under him asked to be eaten this evening. Still, he couldn’t hate it. It made him powerful. Not only as a wolf, but as the man inside the wolf. He could feel the change almost immediately. He was more confident, stronger, sharper. He’d always been smart, but it was like the missing elements of his personality were filled in with the wolf’s instinct.

He shredded the deer until there were only swaths of hide and shattered bone left behind, then he gnawed the marrow out of the bone. If he was in his own cabin, or any place that he was staying by himself long term, he’d have brought the bone back, but that wasn’t an option this time and he had no idea if he’d be able to stop again this moon cycle. He needed to get back to his car and continue on his way. People would be waiting for him. Blue was waiting. Adam should go hunt his car down now and check on it.

Instead, he followed after the white deer. It had been too long for him to seriously try to catch up with it, but he wanted to know what other unknowns this forest held. He wondered if Ronan knew what was in his forest. He wondered if this was what caused his car to die. He’d seen magic do worse.

The forest was dark but fireflies lit the way and Adam was used to looking through the dark as a wolf. He’d grown to appreciate it and the things it hid.

He didn’t find the deer again by the time he came out of the forest, but he had found a small stream and he took the opportunity to bathe himself. The last thing he needed was to track blood into someone else’s house. Besides, if he was filthy when he turned back, the transformation was all the more painful and he was sick for days after.

The forest only gave way to the backyard of the house and Adam shimmied under the same hole he’d dug earlier in the evening, body still aching from the transformation too much for him to think of leaping the spired fence. He could’ve probably done it now, but he’d wait for the chance of tomorrow to try. If he couldn’t leave the estate by then, he wouldn’t be upset about the extra night in the enchanted woods.

He crept along the grounds, lest Ronan or a groundskeeper see him out a window and open fire, until the house loomed ahead of him. Immediately, Adam saw the bodies on the porch and his initial reaction was to cover his eyes with a paw--a childish reaction to seeing something naughty. But he kept his eyes opened and realized the bodies weren’t wrapped in a loving embrace.

Ronan lifted his head and blood dripped like rubies in the moonlight for the few seconds it took him to lock eyes with Adam in the grass. When he grinned, his teeth were red and shiny and the body in his arms sank back into the chair on the porch.

“Well, we both have secrets, don’t we?” he asked, and advanced towards Adam.

Adam tucked tail and ran.


	2. When the Wolfbane Blooms, and the Autumn Moon is Bright

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, alright, the graphic depictions of violence extend to body horror (of the MC variety). Sorry.
> 
> Chapter Title from Wolfman (2010)

Ronan was after the wolf like a flash. Despite the fact that he very much so wanted to groan and finish his dinner, he couldn’t have someone running around with that much information. Sure, the likelihood that a werewolf would tell a human about a vampire was pretty slim to none, but still. Who knew what wolves did. Who knew if there were entire packs of them roaming around, waiting to live out some Len Wiseman fantasy.

It had been many years since Ronan had ventured deep into the forest. He’d had a falling out with it and the danger outweighed the solace he found in the dark trees. Paired with the fact that Adam was unnaturally fast, Ronan started to think he might lose this race.

He stepped in something slick and he looked down to find a pair of rabbit ears underfoot. “Oh, gross,” he said to no one, though maybe Adam could hear him. “You left the ears behind?”

Something significantly more wet caught his ears and he took off again. He saw a flash of Adam’s light hide running from a destroyed deer as he burst through a treeline and he followed after it. Adam must be a young monster, he thought. Ronan remembered being unable to resist the temptation of the dangerous part of him. Hunger was a crazy, strong thing. Strong enough to lead you astray while running for your life.

The next time he saw the sandy fur, he leapt without further thought. He caught the wolf around the ribs and they went tumbling too quickly and too hard through the leafy undergrowth. Ronan swore he could hear Adam groan and he had to look at a gash in his arm himself. It was hard to tell through the gore on his muzzle, but Adam seemed to be unscathed. Ronan threw himself around Adam again, locking his arms around the wolf’s neck as he bucked wildly.

“Stop, stop!” Ronan said, trying to keep his body away from Adam’s mouth. He couldn’t feel pain, but his skin very much so did open up and losing blood negated his dinner. “Listen to me, dog boy!” He leaned over to bite down on Adam’s ear with his back teeth, keeping his fangs out of the way. The last thing he needed was to get werewolf blood in his mouth.

Adam yelped and squirmed free before fixing Ronan with wounded eyes. Ronan looked away with a scoff. “Well, you weren’t being very cooperative,” he defended. Sitting in the leaves, he felt foolish. But Adam hadn’t run yet, so he stood up and dusted himself off.

“I’m not a murderer,” he said. Even as a wolf, Adam looked skeptical. “Okay, I am. But not a morally objectionable one. They aren’t real. It’s too complicated to explain. If I need human blood, I have...friends who will let me drink from them and I don’t hurt them. Usually I use blood bags.” That was more morally objectionable since they came from emergency stashes in park ranger buildings. “What, like you’ve never eaten a person?”

The wolf shook his large head.

Ronan let out a breath and rolled his eyes. “We have to get back to the house. Who knows what that body will do if I don’t finish it.”

He was surprised when the wolf walked by his side. For the first few steps, he was sure he’d look down and Adam would be gone. Still, the wolf seemed a little forlorn about the whole situation. The promise of a warm bed was stronger than fear of potentially being eaten apparently. It was not a dilemma Ronan had ever had to face.

The wolf was much larger than wolves Ronan had seen before. And he’d seen some pretty ferocious wolves. Even the kind that were part human underneath. Well, part vampire. Ronan hadn’t really mastered the lupine transformation. His talents lied with corvids. Adam was nearly up to the bottom of his ribs on all four legs, and broad as the day was long. His coat was the same light, dusty blond that his hair was and had the same subtle curl to it, especially on the damp ends. His teeth were fearsome when he opened his mouth and Ronan did not want to be in front of them at any point. He had the same eyes as when he was human. Ronan reached down to pet his head. Adam growled, but didn’t snap, so Ronan scratched behind his large ears.

“You really thought I wasn’t going to notice, huh? Big ass dog in my yard? Even if I couldn’t hear you sneak out and creak every piece of wood to do it, I’d have seen you come back.”

The wolf let out a breath of air from his nose.

“No wonder you slept so hard today. Yesterday. The spell was meant for humans. You were already too susceptible to me. Vampire magic is a lot more powerful on werewolves.”

Adam’s eyes flashed up to him and Ronan wasn’t sure if he knew any of the lore between their species.

“Besides, I’m sure whatever the hell your body was doing to you must’ve been exhausting. God, that little shit was right. It’s a good thing I didn’t try to eat you.”

He hadn’t needed Noah’s ghostly advice, though. He’d pretty much made the decision as soon as he’d seen Adam shove a hand through his hair that he was more likely to die for Adam than kill him.

Humans had that kind of power over vampires sometimes, and they weren’t even magical.

Then again, Adam wasn’t a human.

Still, what Ronan felt pull at his unbeating heart for Adam had nothing to do with what kind of blood ran in his veins. Actually, he couldn’t smell Adam at all. It was all about his wry smile and the way he looked at the old pictures in the house like they meant something to him personally. Like he  _ wanted  _ them to mean something to him. Adam Parrish seemed deeply fragile and broken and then remade in his own image much stronger.

Wolf blood would do that.

But, again, no. That wasn’t it. It was all Adam to him.

Ronan leaned over and finally picked up on the wolf smell. Wet dog, through and through. He didn’t know how he’d missed it earlier. Supposedly werewolf blood smelt better when they were more human, towards the waning of their powers at the New Moon, but Ronan had never met another werewolf to confirm.

The body was still on the back porch where he’d left it. Adam veered to the other end, circled thrice, and collapsed down in an exhausted heap. He looked up at Ronan boredly. Ronan gripped the body’s collar a little more firmly.

“I’m still gonna eat. So. Deal.”

He ducked his head back down and went back to it. The blood wasn’t nearly as warm and the body had lost a lot of it while he’d been gone. The chair would have to be washed in the evening. Still, a meal was a meal, and after stunning Adam into sleep last night, he needed a good bout of energy. When he shifted to bite a hole in the body’s leg, he looked over to check on Adam and found half wolf and half man. The man parts looked badly broken, arms twisted the wrong way, a jaw hanging limply askew to fit long canines, hair shed everywhere. It looked like half-wolf-half-man Adam was laying on a carpet.

Ronan looked away and went back to draining the body in front of him. Probably he should be more disgusted, but he also wasn’t in the mood to waste any more than he already had. But he couldn’t ignore the images in his mind of Adam’s mangled body for long and finally he threw aside the blood-bag-body to look at the wolf.

Adam was a man again, struggling to stay upright on his knees on the porch. His eyes were distant and wavering, unable to stop on much of anything. When he realized Ronan was looking at him, he tried to stand, using the other chair as a grip. “I need a bed,” he said roughly. He almost slipped on the blood that covered his body and Ronan was there quickly to catch him.

“You need a shower first,” Ronan said.

“I’ll sleep in the grass,” Adam offered. His head lolled to Ronan’s shoulder and it was a good thing his shirt was already bloody from his own meal or he might be upset.

“You can sleep in the bed. You just need to wash off first.”

Adam made a noise but didn’t lift his head. Ronan sighed and bent a little to hook his arm behind Adam’s knees to lift him up in a bridal hold. He carried him back into the house and up to the second story bathroom because there was no way he was having double wet dog smell in his bathroom.

The teeth in the sink were disgusting.

He dumped Adam into the tub and turned on the showerhead so it would rain over him. The blood drained away easily, fresh and still wet, and there didn’t seem to be any further wounds on Adam’s body, except for a cut in his shoulder that was already scabbed over.

“Are you still with me, wolf-boy?” he asked, shifting his weight from side to side. Adam mumbled something incoherent and then smashed his face against the side of the tub trying to turn over. With a sigh, Ronan knelt by the tub and got a washcloth to finish wiping away the grime and gore of the evening. He gave special care to the scab on his shoulder, but refused to be gentle anywhere else.

“What are you doing?” a voice asked from the doorway. Ronan nearly came out of his skin as he leapt to his feet. Vampire super senses didn’t do shit for ghosts.

“Noah,” he hissed and looked at the wet cloth guiltily like it was evidence in a trial. He dropped it back in the tub.

“I told you to send him home.”

“Well, things fuckin’ changed, didn’t they? Why didn’t you tell me what he was?” he asked in a low rush. Adam was pretty much out in the tub, though, so he didn’t think raising his voice would do much.

“Why didn’t you notice?” Noah asked, crossing his arms over his chest with a frown. “I told you not to eat him.”

“And I didn’t eat him and now he’s in the bathtub covered in blood. Cause and effect seems to be a flat circle around here.”

Noah rolled his eyes and floated through Ronan to look at the man in the tub. “Did you kill him?”

“What? No. He’s...exhausted or something. He’s been a whole ass wolf for seven hours.”

Noah hummed and Ronan wasn’t sure if it was a real sound or not. “He still looks so normal,” he said. He reached a hand down to touch Adam’s hair, but wasn’t solid enough to actually do it, which Ronan could tell frustrated him. “This house doesn’t need any more supernatural creatures,” he said as he stood up.

“I dunno. I think there’s another storm set for tomorrow.”

“Ronan.”

“Nothing this interesting has happened in ages,” he whined softly. “It’s nice having someone else to talk to.”

“You’ve hardly talked to him. And he’s not a stray dog for you to adopt.”

“Well, I mean…”

“No, Ronan. Get him back to his car. Siphon gas out of a tractor if you have to.”

“First of all, that gas is as old as I am. And secondly, it’s a magic issue, not a gas issue. It’s always a magic issue.”

Noah glared at him. Ronan stared back.

“It’s my house. You’re the one haunting it. Leave if you don’t like this new development.”

“If you wouldn’t lock me in a room all day, maybe I’d try.”

“I told you that wasn’t me. I’m trying to find something to break the spell. If you’d tell me who set it--”

“No,” Noah answered, final and sure.

Many, many, many years ago, Ronan had woken in his grand bed to find a young man staring at him. He’d much come out of his skin then too. The young man hadn’t been a man, but a ghost and he hadn’t left since. During the day, the ghost was free to roam wherever he pleased. But as soon as sunset hit, he was stuck in the extra room on the second floor, very specifically. All night, he rotted away like a living thing, like a real body. And by morning, he looked young and whole again. Ronan had never met the man when he’d been alive and he couldn’t get a straight answer out of him about the events leading to the haunting.

For his part, Noah was a very terrible ghoul. He was more interested in reading over Ronan’s shoulder and making himself corporeal enough to hide Ronan’s clothes while he was in the shower than he was in actually haunting the house. He was happy when he wasn’t rotting, which Ronan couldn’t fault him for, and liked to laugh. He was also incredibly opinionated about what Ronan did with his house, apparently.

“What are you going to do when Gansey comes again?” Noah asked, drawing Ronan’s eyes away from the sleeping werewolf.

“I don’t know.”

“He’ll definitely want to interrogate him the way he interrogated you.”

“Yeah, probably. But maybe he’s seen more werewolves than vampires in his park ranger-y things.”

Noah made a face of doubt. “Will you at least get him dressed?” he asked.

If Ronan could flush and blanche, he would. “I figured I’d leave him the dignity of doing it himself. I just have to get him back into his bed. You wanna test your strength on the door?”

Noah glowed and looked a little more solid at the challenge and then disappeared. Ronan heard the second spare room door creak open and he turned off the water. He didn’t really feel like getting up close and personal with Adam to dry him, or really to carry him, so he just scooped him up again and got him into the spare room. The werewolf would have to deal with the sheets being a little damp if he woke up, though Ronan was very much so doubting he would wake up any time soon.

When he had the blanket pulled up to a modest level on Adam’s body, Noah reached out to prod a finger against Adam’s arm. “He’s really warm.”

“Well, he’s part dog,” Ronan said. “I’m sure that comes with the package.”

“I got the curtains pulled in this room,” Noah said. “Do you think he opened any others?”

Right. If Noah was out of his room, the sun must’ve risen enough to color the sky. It wouldn’t be strong enough yet, especially through windows, to scald Ronan immediately, but it was difficult to get sun warmth out of the house once it was in.

“I think he left straight out his window,” he said. “And I checked the normal ones before I got the body last night.” He knew he could at least walk down to his bedroom and the living room without finding a drawn window. He hadn’t heard Adam rummaging around before he left. It was probably fine.

“How was making it?”

“I still can’t make it perfect,” Ronan said. “It’s still too real. Too human.”

Noah made a noise and disappeared.

“Thanks,” Ronan said. He looked at Adam again. Noah was right. He looked just like any other fragile human out there. He looked very small in the bed.

Adam turned over, planting his face in the crook of his arm and Ronan quietly left for his own room.

  
  


Adam was standing in the kitchen at duskfall. For a moment, Ronan took a second to stare at his back, at mottled bruises that definitely hadn’t been there when he’d carried him upstairs. There were scars too, and fresh gashes, like his body hadn’t been aware of the torture it had gone through the night before until he’d rested.

Ronan cleared his throat, though it was nearly impossible for him to have an obstruction in it, and Adam jumped a little, turning from the stove. He looked bashful as he took in Ronan and went back to pushing pepper slices around in the frying pan.

“I suppose it’s too inadequate to say I’m cooking,” he said.

“The amount you ate last night, I’m surprised you’re hungry,” Ronan said.

“Why are you using a different voice with him? All deep and growly and sultry,” Noah asked, suddenly at his side. Judging from the fact that Adam’s eyes didn’t flash over to the ghost, Ronan figured Noah’s presence was his own personal gift. “You sound like a trope.”

Adam got even more bashful and scuffed a socked foot against the floor. “I’m real sorry if I was a bother,” he said with an accent Ronan hadn’t heard in a long time. He felt his undead heart melt down to his feet. This was very bad. “I don’t think real well when I’m like that. But, to be fair, you gave me a scare too.”

“I told you we both had secrets,” Ronan said.

“Yeah, immediately before acting like you were going to eat me.”

“I’m not going to eat you.” Weeellllll. “It’d probably kill me.”

“I had a dream that said the same thing the first night I was here,” Adam said, sounding curious. Clearly the horror of the previous night had passed. Ronan glared at the ghost next to him while Adam’s eyes unfocused in thought. 

Noah shrugged. “I was trying to save your life.”

“So,” Ronan said, bringing his gaze back to Adam. “Did you really stumble upon my house or are you trying to hunt me down?”

“I doubt it’s prudent for monsters to work with monster hunters.”

Ronan scoffed. “You’re hardly a monster. Though what you did to my rabbits was pretty monstrous.”

“The ears give me hairballs,” Adam whined, very much so like a dog that had had its favorite toy taken away. It had been decades since Ronan had had a dog.

“Peppers,” Ronan said. Adam turned back and poured in a package of ground meat. “Where did you get that?” Ronan asked.

“It was in the freezer?” Adam said.

“No, my fridge only has old blood bags in it.”

“I stole it,” Noah said. At Ronan's new disapproving look, he shrugged. “I can’t really pay for it, can I? I zapped over to the meat market, grabbed it, and zapped back. I made sure to get expired stuff. I figured a dog stomach could handle it better. I’m doing them a favor really. The crime was them trying to sell week old meat. You said you weren’t kicking him out. He needs to eat.”

Ronan wanted to point out that clearly Adam was capable of catching his own food, but with Adam standing right there not seeing Noah, he couldn’t. “And the peppers then?” he asked of both men.

“Not me,” Noah said.

“There’s a bush in the east yard,” Adam said. “It looks pretty wild, but most of your property does. You don’t have a groundskeeper do you?”

Ronan leveled a stare at him. “I keep eating them.”

Adam squirmed. “That’s not funny. I don’t know you well enough to know if that’s true or not.”

“It’s difficult to keep a groundskeeper when you don’t age and drink human blood to stay functional,” Ronan said. “Or a gardener, or a horse trainer, or anyone else.”

The Barns used to be a truly grand estate. They didn’t have hands on hands, but they had their family and a few loyal employees. Then, the family dissolved before Ronan’s eyes and against anything he could do and the Barns had fallen into disrepair.

As if reading his mind, Adam said, “With all the free time on your hands, you can’t keep it up yourself?”

“I hope those peppers are poisonous.”

Adam brushed his thumb along his nose. “Good sense of smell. I’m pretty good about not eating things that’ll make me sick.”

“You ate most of a deer.”

“Only the good parts.”

The meat began to sizzle and Adam turned his attention back to what he was doing. Ronan grabbed a blood bag out of the fridge, glaring over his shoulder at the bounty of stolen items that now sat in the usually sparse appliance. Noah smiled and floated upside down. He poured the rest of a half empty bag into a glass and then sat down at the rarely used dining table. He brushed things out of the way so Adam could have a place to sit eventually.

“The body outside isn’t real,” Adam said when Ronan was halfway through his glass.

“What makes you say that?” Ronan asked, boredly, the voice of someone who wouldn’t argue a truth just to keep it a secret.

Adam looked over and brushed his nose again. “I know a dead body when I see one.”

“I told you last night I wasn’t a murderer. It’s complicated.”

“I thought you meant complicated like ‘I only kill bad guys’ complicated.”

“Well, you know what they say about assumptions.”

Adam glared at him again and Ronan was struck, again, at how young Adam was. Humans didn’t get to him that way very often. Gansey didn’t affect him, even when he fell asleep on his arms, glasses askew, over an old book. Maybe it was that Adam was a monster too, and a much newer one, still trying to grapple with the humanity of it all. Maybe it was just that his beard made him look like a boy playing dress up in his father’s closet. Ronan didn’t know. Instead, he said, “Have you heard the stories of vampires with special abilities?”

Adam shrugged, arms crossed over his chest for a split second before the food on the stove popped and he jumped and then cracked three eggs into the meat and peppers and began to stir it around.

“Are you going to eat all of that right now?” Ronan asked dubiously.

“Vampires with special abilities,” Adam redirected. “I’ve heard the dumb shit. Super speed. Mind reading. Emotional manipulation.”

“Are you listing things out of  _ Twilight _ ?”

“You know, we don’t read  _ Dracula  _ in public school.”

“But you read  _ Twilight _ ?”

“Hey, whatever it takes to engage squirrely middle schoolers.”

Ronan made a face and took extra time to drink. “Super speed, super strength, that kind of thing comes with the territory. With being a superior creature.”

“Or a creature that doesn’t have to worry about tearing muscle off of bone.”

“Sure. And we have something like emotional manipulation. Or a mind control. It’s kind of this ability to...intoxicate people.”

“Victims.”

“People. To lull them into doing what you want. I did it to you to make you sleep when you first arrived here.”

“You gave me an emotional roofie?”

Ronan made an unbecoming noise for a centuries old creature. “There’s also the transformational aspect of our powers. Most vampires can transform into any number of animals, usually one or two, but I’ve heard there are vampires that have mastered all animals.”

“Can you?” Adam asked, moving his pan off of the heat and leaning against the oven so he could focus all of his attention on Ronan.

“Sure. I can transform into a raven.”

Adam looked impressed for a moment. “Tell me more. Did you make it storm yesterday?”

“Yes and no,” Ronan said. “I can control my property. I couldn’t do something like that anywhere else. So it’s less that I control the weather and more I control this very small world.”

“Okay, so what does any of this have to do with the body outside?”

“Well, I have this additional gift. My father had it before me and I’ve only met one other vampire with it. It’s...not related to the vampirism. I had it before my father turned me. I suspect he had it before he was turned too.”

“Wait, your own father turned you?”

“That’s another complicated story for some other night. I need answers from you so let me finish this explanation first.”

Now it was Adam’s turn to make a face. He brought the hot pan over to the table with a fork and settled in. He inhaled food. It was like watching a video of a dog that couldn’t wait to get to its food bowl. Before Ronan could raise his glass to his lips, Adam had half the pan cleared.

“Jesus, you are a wild animal.”

Out came that glare again. “You have a special power,” he reminded Ronan.

“Right. Well. I can take things out of my dreams. If I fall asleep, I can go to this other dream space, not quite an unconsciousness, and I can wake up with things from my dreams. It was easier as a human, easier to sleep and dream, but I’ve gotten pretty good at using it for making fresh bodies of blood.”

Ronan watched Adam think. He gnawed on a slice of pepper, not really eating, it more shredding it between his back teeth. Ronan realized Adam had double sets of fangs. He had no idea how he hadn’t noticed it when the werewolf came to the door.

“You were too busy staring at his ass,” Noah said.

“Get out of my head,” Ronan snapped back under his breath. He took a sip of his drink when Adam glanced at him quizzically.

“It’s a real thing, what you bring back?”

“As real as I can make it,” Ronan said with a nod. “Sometimes I dream impossible things. Cars that run without engines, bodies with warm blood that aren’t alive. What I can visualize is what comes out. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the car drives without the engine. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I just have the frame and nothing else.”

“So the body outside is just...a person shaped blood bag? Why not just…” Adam gestured to the glass of blood.

“Blood bags and blood out of bodies isn’t the same thing. And drinking like this isn’t the same as drinking it out of a body. Would you want to eat processed ground beef when you could be slaughtering bunnies?”

“Dude, enough about the rabbit,” Adam groaned. “I think I understand. I mean. I won’t ever understand. I’m not like you. But...if you’re not actually killing anyone, I guess I can’t say anything.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Ronan asked.

If the red flush that raced down to the thick happy trail on Adam’s stomach was anything to go by, Ronan didn’t need to hear the answer.

“Yes,” Adam said anyway. “I have.”


	3. There is Much to Be Learned From Beasts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Prolonged vomiting in the last section of this chapter, begins "Adam did not go anywhere in the morning" (summary of section provided in end note)
> 
> Chapter Title from Dracula (1992)

The only reason Adam admitted to it was because he didn’t feel like he was under a hunter’s knife with Ronan. Certainly Ronan was a predator, but Adam wasn’t his prey. Ronan wasn’t a cop, he wasn’t a neighbor with prying eyes, he wasn’t a park ranger trying to figure out exactly how long Adam had been camped out for.

And it was a heavy truth to carry all on his own.

“Almost all wolves do. The first change is...feral. You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re just...hungry.”

Adam barely remembered his. What he had cobbled together had been from the days and weeks afterwards. He’d gone to bed one night and woke up the next morning miles away from the trailer park, covered in blood and completely naked. It had been one of the worst moments of his life. He hadn’t been that scared since…

“What did you do?” Ronan asked, and he almost looked interested.

“I don’t really know. I grew up around forests and mountains, but they were all on the outer edges of town. I must’ve run to the forest and… I think I killed a vagrant sleeping just off the highway. I didn’t remember at first. I didn’t remember anything. A week later, a hiker found an arm. They didn’t...find enough of the rest of him to figure out what happened exactly, but they said it was a bear attack.”

“Jesus,” Ronan said, which surprised Adam because he didn’t expect a vampire to be able to say it. “Did you do it again?”

Adam looked up at him, face guarded for once, and then stood up without saying anything. He shoveled the last spoonfuls of his dinner into his mouth and then set the frying pan in the sink. “I’m going to shift again tonight. I need to stretch the wolf while I can.”

“Can I watch?” Ronan asked. He didn’t seem too put off by Adam avoiding his question.

“Sure. But it’s not a pretty sight.”

“I saw teeth, I can guess what happens.”

Adam grimaced and rubbed his jaw. “It’ll be faster tonight. The subsequent shifts always are. “

“How many times can you do it with each full moon?”

“It varies, but usually at least three nights. Sometimes I can push it up to a week, especially in Blue Moon months.”

“Literally once in a blue moon, huh?” Ronan said with a grin that showed off his impressive fangs. Adam wasn’t sure if he’d just missed something so glaringly obvious or if they retracted unless he was drinking.

Then again, Ronan hadn’t said anything about Adam’s eight fangs. He hadn’t said anything at all about Adam. “Did you know I was a werewolf before you saw me last night?” Adam asked.

Ronan shook his head, finished off his glass of blood, and set it in the sink with the pan. “No, I thought I was going to eat you.”

Adam shivered and fixed a new glare on him. “Stop saying that!”

“It’s true. The opportunity was too good to pass up. Dinner delivery.”

Adam was pretty certain it wasn’t true. He couldn’t imagine indiscriminate killing would help a vampire. Then again, Ronan lived in the middle of nowhere. Probably half the missing hiker stories could be drawn back to him.

That was ridiculous. Ronan was perfectly fine. He said he dreamed bodies. He’d just used a blood bag. He wasn’t eating everyone who came to his door.

“So, can I watch?” Ronan repeated.

Adam looked out the split in the window curtains at the final dregs of sunlight on the horizon. “Yeah. But I have to go now. The shift will be nastier the later I try.”

Ronan shrugged. “Fine with me. I’ve had my coffee.”

Adam nodded. “Alright, let’s go,” he said, walking back to the back door. He’d been up for a few hours while the sun had still been up and he let himself explore the house. It was as lovely inside as outside, and as eclectic upstairs as down. It was sprawling, so it was a good thing Ronan was probably not chasing hapless victims through the winding hallways onto half balconies and porches.

It was the most beautiful place Adam had ever been, but it was haunted. Adam felt like he could see ghosts lurking behind every picture and sleeping in every bed. Ronan was right, they were both hiding secrets.

When he stepped outside, Ronan followed, but kept to the back of the covered porch, eyeing the horizon warily. Though he knew vampires didn’t have to breathe, Adam was certain he heard a gasp when he shoved his jeans down.

“Sorry, it’s just hard to buy jeans every three days when you don’t actually live in society,” he explained.

“Where do you live?” Ronan asked. Adam was sure he was imagining the strain in his voice, but it made him preen anyway.

“Usually in forests. Sometimes I stay with friends, if we’re closer to the new moons,” Adam explained. “You’d be amazed at how many luxury cabins are sitting, empty, in woods across america.”

“Ever find a witch?” Ronan asked.

Adam laughed, genuinely, caught off guard. “Yeah, actually. But not in the woods. I might be wolf stew if I had. Are you ready?”

Ronan gestured for him to continue and settled into one of the chairs on the porch. Adam stepped into the grass, shivered a little at the chill in the air, and rolled his shoulders back. As always, it started with his mouth. He dug his heel into the soil and spit his teeth into the hole. It was less painful, the teeth newer than the set from last night, still loose in his gums. The fangs that grew in in their place hurt less too. He snarled and shook his head as the bones in his face split and grew and he had to drop to his knees when his elbows bent backwards. His knees followed. A full body itch overtook him, but the rest of it was so painful he hardly paid attention as thick fur sprouted from his skin, as the skin hardened and grew thicker too. His claws scored the ground as his spine separated, bent, and pushed his lower body back.

“Jesus Christ,” Ronan said again as Adam spit blood into the same hole his teeth were in. He was at the railing of the porch now, leaning out towards Adam, but keeping the measly barrier between them like it was a petting zoo. Adam snarled and shook his head again, trying to get used to the placement of the fangs in his gums. He looked up at Ronan, waiting on something. His muscles were coiled tightly under his coat and energy was rolling off of him, but still, he waited to see if Ronan would approach him.

The vampire did not. “Go on,” he said instead. “Just be back before sunrise. I’m not leaving the door unlocked.”

Adam didn’t wait any longer. He took off for the fence, clearing it in a leap the way he knew he could, and disappeared into the forest.

The forest seemed darker this evening. Sometimes that happened. Adam didn’t need to hunt, so his senses rested. Most werewolves enjoyed nights like this, the power with none of the responsibility. Adam couldn’t stop thinking about how he should find a rabbit or two to keep on the property to eat if he shifted unexpectedly or started to turn later in the cycle. That was a complicated matter that required satisfying the wolf in his own human body. The human body, even of a werewolf, was still very susceptible to damages, like disease, or pierced organs from bones.

Besides, he’d need some to put in his car, to take to Blue’s place, to avoid a bad shift up there where he could barely hunt. His car. Blue. Right. Shit. He was supposed to be checking on it. The dark of the forest called to him, but he veered off, skirting the edges of the forest and the property until he found the main road.

It was dangerous to walk too close to any lights, but especially a road. It was one thing for a camper to see a wolf in the middle of the woods. It was another thing to get hit by a car. Adam didn’t have the most experience with navigating society, as he’d told Ronan, but the initial premise was easy. Stay in the treeline and only come out to check location as quickly as possible. His car wasn’t that far from Ronan’s estate, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

And he did find his car without a problem. It was still pulled off on the side of the road. There were no tickets on it and it didn’t seem to have been vandalized. He’d still have to get it taken somewhere. At least back to the estate.

He didn’t know why he felt the need to stay at the estate. Maybe it was a product of Ronan’s initial emotional roofie. Maybe it was the forest calling him. It had been stupid on Adam’s part to try to drive all the way up to Blue so close to a full moon. The one day grace period truly did not allow for accidents such as this. He really should just wait the week out and try again. But he still needed his car.

Just as he was deciding he could leave it for a few more hours, a smell drifted to him on the wind. Close by. Another wolf. Another werewolf.

No, a pack.

Werewolf packs weren’t any more common than they were uncommon. They were usually confined to a family unit, maybe a group of friends on the off chance a werewolf turned several people who happened to get along. The main problem was that, though there was no necessary connection between a werewolf and whomever turned them, individual wolves were still wary of those turned by others. Adam thought it must’ve been left over from the bygone eras when packs roamed together frequently and fought for space and food. An engrained distrust of others, even if they were the same brand of fucked up.

Adam did not want to get caught out alone by a pack. He crawled on his belly under his car and tried to watch the treeline for the pack. They’d almost undoubtedly smell him, especially if they were hunting and territorial, but hopefully they’d be too out of it to search him down. The wolf brain was pretty one track minded. Find the next meal and carry on. Deal with threats when they emerged in front of you.

One was emerging in front of Adam.

The pack was four strong. A beautiful, large black wolf and a shorter, but just as muscular silver wolf with black accents walked in front. They walked in opposite steps, keeping their eyes on the road ahead of them, each taking a side of the pack to watch. The two wolves in the back were smaller, but almost identical to each other. They were white blond, one slightly darker, veering towards the blue silver that wolves wore so well. They roughoused with each other, the darker one biting down on the other’s ear until the lighter one yelped and scrambled away.

Brothers, Adam knew instinctively. Not the kind of formed brotherhood some packs were based on. Those two wolves were brothers as humans. All four must have all been turned by the same wolf. The two lead wolves were too in step with each other, too mindful of the playful wolves behind them for the four to have just found each other in a woods.

They were young. Probably as old as Adam was, maybe a little fresher. Too coordinated to be too much fresher than Adam, though. If they were still in their early cycles, they wouldn’t be able to work together, no matter how close their human bonds. So close to a full moon, new wolves were unpredictable. This pack was practiced.

If they smelt Adam’s scent on the air, they didn’t let it slow them down. They carried on down the road, out of the trees and in plain view of anyone who wanted to drive by. Adam waited until he couldn’t see them, until the wind didn’t smell like them, to slowly crawl back out from under his car.

He was met with a man.

Adam bared his teeth immediately, but retreated instead of attacking. The man noticed and a smirk cut across his face like a slash from a knife. Gold capped fangs sat on his lower lip afterwards.

Not a man. A vampire.

The vampire was tall and lanky. There was the illusion of lithe muscle under his pale skin, but nothing particularly useful, Adam thought. A creature who was used to letting other people do the hard, dirty work for him. His knuckles were black and slashed, a semblance at bruising without any circulating blood in his body. His eyes, deep set and dark rimmed, were blown from the pupils, dark and haunting. His neck was littered with other black bruises and above the dirty collar of his tank top and under a gold chain around his neck, the tips of three slashes crawled up his skin. Two more sets stretched from is back over his shoulders.

“You’re not one of mine, are you little doggie?” the vampire asked, all lilting accent like he’d stepped off the set of a monster movie. “But you could be. You look just as desperate. How good are you at following commands?”

He put his hand on Adam’s head, thin fingers curling in Adam’s fur, and then yanked his head back. Adam jerked away, clamping his jaws around the vampire’s forearm and ripping away a chunk of flesh.

The vampire snarled and reached out to hit Adam with his good arm but Adam had been hit too often and he had no plans to start again. He dashed away, back into the forest. He didn’t care that it was cowardly, or that he could’ve stayed to fight. He had no idea what a vampire was capable of. As was, he knew Ronan had kept up with him last night and Adam was sure if this vampire chased after him, there would _have_ to be a fight.

The vampire howled curses after him, but didn’t seem to follow. Adam still didn’t slow down until he was back under Ronan’s fence, as if that could keep him safe. Ronan wasn’t outside, which kicked Adam’s heart rate up again, but he couldn’t open the door as a wolf, so he had to let himself change back. It was more gruesome since his body and his fear wanted him as protected as possible. The fangs were slow to sink back into his gums, the claws, clinging to the tips of fingers that couldn’t hold them up, twisted and pulled at fragile human bone. Eventually though, he was able to stumble to his feet and into the house, still shedding fur.

Almost immediately, Ronan was at his side, fangs long with the fresh scent of blood, but face concerned. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Adam shook his head and couldn’t help it when his legs went out from under him as Ronan’s arm came around his waist. “There was...a pack,” he said. “A pack of werewolves.”

“Did they attack you?” Ronan asked, and Adam saw him try to discern the shift blood from injury blood. He must’ve been a horrid sight. A rushed, forced shift, crazed eyes--not physically half wolf, half man, but mentally there, and that was the dangerous type.

Adam shook his head again. “No. I don’t think they saw me. If they did, they didn’t care. But there was a vampire too. Another one.”

Ronan’s fingers tightened against Adam’s hip as he helped him up the stairs. “Did _they_ attack you?” he asked.

Adam didn’t know how to put it into words. Of course he hadn’t been attacked. And he wasn’t really threatened. Still the vampire had gotten under his skin. The fear he felt was still surging in his veins. He’d felt cornered and trapped. He felt like a teenager again, cowering against the edge of a dresser. “I thought… He said I wasn’t his but that I could be. And he grabbed me. I thought he was going to follow me. I thought he was gonna put me in a cage,” Adam said slowly. He stepped into the shower when Ronan guided him to and turned on the water without really feeling it.

There were supernatural creatures who hunted each other for rewards, even for sport. Monsters were fucked up that way. But the vampire hadn’t struck Adam as the type. His lazy gait, the signs of pointless fights on his body, the gold fangs. Adam didn’t know what it was, but he knew he wasn’t a monster hunter. He was just terrible.

Ronan reached up to pull leaves from Adam’s hair and Adam couldn’t tell if he was thinking or steadfastly keeping his eyes off of Adam’s body.

“I bit him,” Adam said, to break the silence.

Ronan’s eyes widened and he started to reach for Adam’s jaw, but stopped himself. “Open your mouth,” he said, hand hovering near Adam’s face.

Adam did as he was told and Ronan examined his teeth carefully. “Did he bleed?” he asked.

Adam shook his head. “No. He had these...bruises, but they were just black. Like ink or tar. When I bit him, it was like biting into overdone meat.”

Ronan made a low noise in the back of his throat. “Make sure you wash your mouth out. You might want to help yourself to some of the vodka downstairs too. It’ll help clean your system if you ate part of him.”

Adam’s nose scrunched up and he unconsciously turned his face up to the water to swish around his mouth. When he looked over again, Ronan was setting out a towel, clearly trying to excuse himself. “Where are you going?” he asked, after he spit a few times.

“I’m gonna go tow your car back.”

“You’ve had a vehicle with gas this whole time?!” Adam asked, wounded when he knew he shouldn’t be. It was just something else to focus on, something to make his mind think of anything but the vampire and his hollow eyes.

“No. Not exactly. Just focus on getting clean and calming down. Let me take care of the rest.”

And then Ronan was gone. Adam swayed back and caught himself against the tile roughly before sliding to the floor of the shower. Like the first night, he laid there until the water ran cold over his skin, and then he dragged himself out and to the bed.

Even under the heavy comforter, Adam couldn’t get warm. He shivered until he found the jeans Ronan must have brought up to him and his flannel shirt. He hadn’t put it on since the evening after he’d arrived and the teeth in the breast pocket prodded at his chest until he dug them out and set them on the small end table. He was asleep shortly after, and horrified to find the half decayed face from the spare room waiting for him in his subconscious.

The apparition brought his hand up to his broken side and tried to hide the damage, as if he could read Adam’s mind. Adam couldn't find it in himself to be horrified or disgusted, not when the boy looked so heartbroken over it.

“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t come to you like this if I could help it, but I don’t know how long you’ll sleep for,” the apparition said. “He’s going to help you until it runs him raw. Please, please watch him. Don’t let him push himself. You have a bigger fight coming.”

“What? What fight?” Adam asked, trying to sit up and finding himself just as stuck as he had been during the first nightmare. “Who are we fighting with?” The roaming pack came to mind, followed shortly and more loudly by the other vampire.

The boy cocked his head, the good side of his mouth pulling up in a sad little smile. “It’s happening to you too. Already thinking as a ‘we.’” The boy reached his free hand out to Adam, but couldn’t cross the edge of the bed, much like Adam couldn’t move from the bed. “Take care of him. Take care of him. Take care of him. Take care of him. Take--”

Adam woke up suddenly and looked around the room. There was no one else there and beyond the window, the world was still dark. Gravel crunched outside and a moment later, headlights cut across the dark room. Adam shoved his boots on and went downstairs to meet Ronan on the porch.

Ronan was getting out of a sleek, grey BMW. Adam’s shitty little car was on a hitch and chain behind it.

“You pulled my car with a BMW?” Adam asked. “God, you’re gonna need a tune up.”

Ronan offered him a sharp smirk and popped the hood and gestured for Adam to come over. Under the hood, Adam found the driveway. Where there should be smooth, beautiful machinery, there was nothing at all.

“You used a car as an example of your dreaming,” Adam said, realization washing over him. “It wasn’t hypothetical.”

“I don’t work in hypotheticals very often. I’d rather just get the shit done.”

“That’s why you don’t have gas.”

“No engine, no gas,” Ronan said with a nod. “But, I did take a second to nap while I was hooking up this piece of shit,” he said, moving to Adam’s car and wrenching open the door. “Hope you don’t mind. I took your keys. Needed to put the car in reverse to wheel it back.” He handed Adam a red canister with some kind of liquid in it. “I haven’t used gas in a while, so it might be wrong. But this should be enough to get you to the next town over so you can fill up again.”

“The next town’s not for another hour, at least.”

“What can I say? Dream gas’ll get you where you need to go. Just not much further.”

Adam leaned into his car and pulled his phone charger free, though without reception it still wouldn’t do him any good, and got his emergency pack out too. It had bandages and granola bars, a flashlight and a flare, like normal packs, but it also had a shot of wolfsbane and a tranq dart. These he handed to Ronan.

“Both of these will put me out,” he said. “Wolves go feral all the time. All it’ll take is one bad turn, one bad scare, and I could take your head off.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ronan said. Adam was realizing it was a favorite phrase. “I’m not putting you down ‘cause you snap at me, wolf-boy”

“I said put me out, not put me down. You’ll have to dump my body somewhere. I’ll wake up eventually.”

Ronan looked horrified for a split second. “I’m not doing that. I’ll chain you up. It’s silver, right?”

“You, a vampire, are gonna touch silver to chain me up?”

Ronan narrowed his eyes at the conundrum. “I’ll get the house ghost to do it.”

“Very funny,” Adam said. “I’ll head out when I wake up.”

Ronan, for once, didn’t let anything show on his face as he went stone still. “Are you...coming back?” he asked.

Adam chewed on his lower lip before he nodded. “I’ll come back. It’d be prudent to spend at least the full week somewhere safe,” he said. “But I need to buy new clothes and some food. I feel bad eating yours, even if I don’t know why you have it.”

Ronan’s shoulders relaxed and he let out a breath he didn’t have to hold. “Blame the house ghost,” he said.

Adam rolled his eyes and they walked inside together.

  
  


Adam went nowhere in the morning except to the middle of the toilet. It was too early for how late his night had been, but the roiling of his stomach would not be ignored. He knew as soon as he saw the color of the vomit in the toilet why he was sick. It was tar black with flecks of lighter pieces of skin floating in the detritus. Clearly he had not been as good at spitting out the vampire as he thought.

“Good God,” Ronan said from the doorway. It was not ‘Jesus Christ’ so Adam thought either Ronan was truly out of it, having been woken from a dead sleep, or Adam looked that awful as he clung to the toilet bowl as another wave of body convulsing nausea hit him. “You didn’t drink the vodka like I told you, did you?” he asked.

Adam tried to shake his head, but it only caused him to throw up more. Ronan squatted down beside him and ran a hand through Adam’s hair. He pulled his head back a little and flushed the toilet before letting Adam get his head back to a manageable level that wouldn’t get sick all over the bathroom.

Adam could tell Ronan was saying something. His voice was low and even and his hand was steady in Adam’s hair, but Adam couldn’t make out the words. He rested a flushed cheek on the edge of the toilet, right ear facing up.

“I can’t hear you,” he gasped finally, spitting more chunks from his mouth to the toilet water. “I’m deaf in my left ear.”

Good ear up now, he did hear Ronan hum contemplatively. “I wasn’t saying anything important. Do you think you’re done?”

Adam’s stomach still burned and his mouth was still filling with saliva, tingles racing along his jaw. He shook his head.

“Alright, just relax, okay? Don’t fight it.”

“What are you, my mother?” Adam asked, though he knew damn well his mother had never helped him through a night of illness. 

Ronan scoffed, but his hand didn’t slow against Adam’s hair. “That’s what I get for being nice, huh?”

Adam arched up again, vomiting until his eyes watered and he was left gasping for air, ribs aching. “I’m the worst guest,” he moaned softly, head tilting on the toilet seat until he realized the thickness in his throat wasn’t more vomit. It was tears. “You have to keep taking care of me.”

“It hasn’t been a real hardship,” Ronan assured sardonically. The sink turned on next to them and a moment later, a plastic rim was being pressed to Adam’s mouth. “Here, rinse and spit,” Ronan said, and Adam did as he was told, trying not to think about Ronan was managing to hold a cup to his face from his other side. “Good, now let’s try to stand up,” he said, and once again Ronan’s arm was around Adam’s waist, looping one of Adam’s arms over Ronan’s shoulders. “Dizzy? Nauseous?” he asked. Adam waited for the first wave to pass him by before he shook his head. “Good, wash your mouth. Like I told you to last night.”

Adam braced himself against the sink and freed his arm from Ronan’s shoulders to cup his hands under the running water and start rising his mouth out. When he felt like there wasn’t actual rot and ash on his tongue, he took several long drinks from his hands and tried to clean his beard some.

“There’s a cup,” Ronan pointed out, but Adam ignored him. If he was using his hands, he could ignore how badly his arms and legs were shaking.

“I need… I should… Go back to sleep,” he said, turning from the sink and catching himself on the doorway.

Ronan hesitated, hands hovering by Adam’s sides. “I’ll...stay with you. Make sure you don’t choke on more vomit,” he said.

Adam was too tired, and too cold, to argue. He stumbled to the bedroom and collapsed in the bed, waiting for Ronan to join him. Instead, a few minutes later, when he was able to pry his eyes open, he found Ronan trying to settle on the floor.

“Do undead creatures of the night use pillows?” Adam asked.

“They are preferred to ancient hardwood.”

“Bed’s big enough for two,” Adam said.

“I don’t want you to puke on me,” Ronan shot back. Adam wished the vampire could blush and he could watch it. Instead, he had to settle for the indignant huff when he threw a pillow on Ronan’s face. He watched Ronan get settled on the floor between half lidded, hazy eyes, and when he stopped moving, Adam reached down to wrap his fingers around Ronan’s wrist loosely.

“Don’t go anywhere without me,” he said in a yawn.

Ronan’s fingers found his skin too. “I won’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary of last section: Adam gets sick after biting the other vampire's forearm and not heeding Ronan's warning to wash his mouth and drink alcohol to clean his system. Ronan wakes up and helps him through the ordeal. Adam tells Ronan he's deaf in one ear and apologizes for being a burden. Ronan offers to stay with Adam while they sleep. He sleeps on the floor with Adam in the bed, but they fall asleep holding each other's wrists. Adam asks Ronan not to leave and Ronan promises he won't.
> 
> Who oh who is this pack of dogs hanging out around this bulgarian piece of shit vampire? 👀🤷♀️


	4. A Goddamn Force of Nature

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed the title of the fic because I just wasn't feeling the original and I haven't been able to get this quote out of my head as I've been writing
> 
> Chapter title from Ginger Snaps (2000)

If Ronan had a working heart, it would have stuttered and probably stopped when he woke up that evening. Adam was a picture out of a dream with sleep tousled hair and his hand still curled around Ronan’s wrist. There was color back in his cheeks and he seemed to be breathing deeply and evenly, a far cry from the choking gasps he’d been managing last night.

It had been a long, long time since Ronan had gotten sick and he forgot the humanness of it all. He knew it had scared him as a child and he always wanted to curl up by his mother’s side after getting sick, but his reasoning had long since been lost to time.

He slowly untangled Adam’s fingers from his wrist and then sat up, stretching even though he didn’t have to. Adam didn’t move in the bed and Ronan had no idea how long he should let the werewolf recover, so he didn’t wake him. When he went to the kitchen, Noah was flickering in and out.

“It’s pretty late for you,” Ronan said as a way of greeting.

“Ronan, listen to me,” Noah said seriously. Seriously enough that Ronan stopped digging out a fresh blood bag and looked at Noah. “I have to tell you about--” He brought a hand up to his own mouth and disappeared.

Ronan’s stomach turned over with anxiety, a feeling that had unfortunately not passed with his life and hadn’t diminished as the boredom of forever set in. Noah didn’t usually give foreboding warnings and Ronan wasn’t sure what he could know. They didn’t pry into each other about how their lives worked as vampire and ghost. It wasn’t necessary for the other to know. Usually. Ronan could really go for knowing what ghosts could discern.

He finished emptying the bag of blood in a coffee mug and then looked in the fridge again. He wasn’t sure if Adam would be able to eat anything, but he figured he’d have to eat _something_. He threw up a lot last night. Would it be better for him to go hunt?

Ronan listened to the noises of the house before ducking out the back door silently.

He came back in a few minutes later with a rabbit, stunned, in his hands. Hopefully Adam got up-and-moving before it came back to and Ronan lost it in the house. Were werewolves like cats? Would Adam hunt it down and destroy half the shit in the living room until he caught it? Sure, it’d probably be smarter just to kill it, but vampires hated dead blood. And, sure, Adam ate ground meat, but as a human, not a wolf. Ronan didn’t know what the wolf wanted. Then again, Adam was human right then. Maybe he couldn’t even turn after a night like the last.

And now Ronan had a rabbit in his house. God, he was an idiot, choking at the first sign of social responsibility in a century.

“What are you doing?” Adam asked. Ronan turned, unable to hide the rabbit, and looked at Adam on the stairs.

“Uh. I thought you’d want to eat, but I haven’t cooked in…” Better to not say, probably. “Ages.”

“So you caught me a rabbit? Are you my cat?” he asked, a tired smile pulling at his lips.

“I didn’t think that you might not be well enough to eat it until after I had it.”

Adam’s stomach growled loud enough that Ronan heard it across the room. “I can eat it,” Adam said. “I’ll just have to be more careful than when I’m a wolf. Human stomachs aren’t wolf stomachs.”

“The transformation...er, the initial turn doesn’t change your human body?” Ronan asked. He handed the rabbit over to Adam when he walked over, and watched Adam wring its neck and then look away before twisting his hands roughly.

“It does. I can definitely handle things I couldn’t beforehand. Like raw meat,” he said, and held up the rabbit’s body. “But punctures in vital organs are gonna be tough no matter what I am. Can I use a knife? I’ll cut it outside,” Adam said. Ronan gestured to the kitchen and then headed to the back door himself to wait for Adam.

The evening was cool, or maybe his body was just relieved he was out well after the sun had set. He sat on one of the chairs and a few minutes later, Adam came out and jumped up on the porch railing, swinging one leg over the edge. Ronan hadn’t meant to watch him, but Adam’s hands were so beautiful in the moonlight, and steady with the knife that he couldn’t help but keep his eyes locked on Adam.

“Thank you,” Adam said and for a moment Ronan thought he was thanking him for watching. “For last night. I guess that whole ‘don’t bite a werewolf’ thing is true in the reverse too.”

“I guess,” Ronan said and couldn’t help himself from glancing at Adam’s neck. Once he’d found the scent of Adam’s blood in the air the first night, he hadn’t been able to lose it. He tracked every small difference between when he was a wolf, when he was a human, and even the way he smelt freshly shifted and covered in blood. That was probably the dangerous blood, Ronan reasoned. There was nothing wrong with trying a small taste of Adam’s blood like this, as a human. Maybe, if he stayed until the full moon, Ronan could ask him to risk it.

“Do you know about any vampires out here?” Adam asked, starting the conversation again from where Ronan had accidentally let it die.

“Um, not for a few years. I mean, there are travellers. Vampires I’d never know about. But noone permanent. I have a friend in the park service. He keeps me up to date about missing hikers or suspicious campers, destroyed animals, that kind of thing. There hasn’t been much recently.”

“A friend?” Adam asked with a raised eyebrow. Ronan was reminded of his excuse the first night, when he was trying to get Adam to stay. “I haven’t really...seduced anyone to drink from in a while. I’m sure Gansey would be down once, just for the curiosity of it.”

“Gansey?”

“It’s a last name,” Ronan explained.

“You wouldn’t do it just once?”

“It’s addicting,” Ronan said and then choked off as Adam tore a chunk of meat free from bone. The zing that ran through his body was old and nearly forgotten and Ronan was having difficulty not-breathing. “It’d...it’d be hard to only do it once. I’d know what he tasted like. I’d want more.”

“And we’re the insatiable, feral ones,” Adam scoffed. He wiped a slash of blood from his cheek and licked it off his hand, making Ronan’s mind white out again. “How’d it work with the other ones then?”

“Other ones?” Ronan asked, already ten thousand miles away from the conversation.

“The ones you did seduce. If you would just keep wanting more, how do you stop?”

Ronan tore his eyes from Adam so he could concentrate to answer. “Eternity is a long time. One of us would get bored and the relationship would end. It’s not like I’m gonna hunt someone down if they don’t show up when I call.”

“How’d you meet Gansey and get him in your pocket?”

“Why, you need a ranger who won’t kick your squatting ass out of a forest?”

“It’s always helpful. But he must be special if you don’t want to lose your relationship with him.”

Ronan shrugged and watched Adam go for a drumstick. It was a lot hotter than it should be. If he didn’t control himself, his fangs were going to sink into his lower gums. That could be a good thing. Then his jaw wouldn’t hang open. “Gansey is only moonlighting as a park ranger. He’s actually some academic who got lost in the woods and was given a name patch and some boots. He’s searching for this dead king.”

“Classy,” Adam said and pried apart half of a rib cage. Ronan mashed his knuckles into his thigh. “He’s trying to raise it from the dead or something?”

That made Ronan falter. “No. I don’t think so. I actually...don’t know what he wants with it. There was something to do with a near death experience.”

“We should exchange notes.”

“Why, did you see something when you thought you were dying?”

Adam shot him a baleful look. “Yeah, the inside of a wolf’s mouth.” He gnawed on some piece of tendon before saying, “It’s more like it made it clear to me what I wasn’t doing. My life didn’t flash before my eyes so much as all the shit I didn’t do that I wanted to.”

“Like what?” Ronan asked.

Adam dug out the rabbit’s heart and examined it in the moonlight. Ronan watched the blood drip from his fingertips and cut his lip on his own fangs.

“I saved myself,” Adam said.

Ronan was there by him in an instant, fingers coming up to the opposite ends of the heart, pulling it from Adam’s fingers. He could tell by the exasperated sigh that Adam was about to argue with him, probably demand his food back, but Ronan only pressed his fingers to Adam’s mouth, until his lips parted under Ronan’s fingers, tongue pressing against Ronan’s knuckles as Ronan let go of the heart like he was giving Adam communion.

What was communion, if not exchange caked in blood?

Ronan leaned down and pressed his mouth over Adam’s.

There were a lot of things about life, about feeling good, that Ronan didn’t remember. This didn’t remind him so much as exceed anything he could concoct in a false memory. Adam’s mouth opened under his like he could take breath from Ronan. Ronan licked the blood from his tongue and his teeth and didn’t even care it was dead animal blood. It was coming from Adam and that’s all that mattered.

He didn’t hear Adam drop the rabbit, but he must have because then his hands were at Ronan’s ribs, rucking up his old tank top to touch his skin. Adam was so hot it felt like he was leaving burns behind him. Ronan thought his cold skin should be melting away, leaving just his burning desire behind to match Adam.

And for as bad as he wanted it, he could tell Adam wanted it just as fiercely. 

“You scared me last night,” Ronan said when Adam put the barest amount of space between them to draw in a breath, because, unfortunately, werewolves still had to breathe. “I thought you were dying.”

“So did I, for a second,” Adam said. His fingers curled against Ronan’s chest and Ronan wished he had a heartbeat for Adam to feel. It would be racing out of control.

“Are you cold?” Ronan asked, rubbing his hands over the goosebumps on Adam’s arms.

Adam shook his head. “I just feel good.”

“Good,” Ronan purred, and picked Adam up. Adam only let a small gasp escape before he was wrapping his legs around Ronan’s waist.

In the face of eternity, three days was not a long time. Ronan had often slept for far longer than that. But the past days with Adam had felt like a brand new lifetime. He didn’t want to look back at what existence was like before him, and he certainly didn’t want to think about the very near future where Adam left again. He wanted to live in this moment over and over, stretching it for as long as he could tempt time to give it to him.

Adam kissed him again as Ronan navigated to his bedroom through muscle memory alone. Even if he could see around Adam, he wouldn’t look away. He didn’t bother with the door, crossing straight to his bed and dropping Adam down on it before crawling over his hips to seal their mouths together again.

Adam dragged his hands up Ronan’s back, pulling the tank top with him and Ronan sat back only long enough to throw it aside. “Is there...anything about you I should know?” he asked. If anyone said it was shyly, he’d eat them.

Adam smirked up at him, squirming under Ronan’s weight. “You read too much erotica,” he said. “Just don’t bite my neck.”

“I wouldn’t tempt myself,” Ronan promised.

“Fuck,” Adam breathed and pulled Ronan back into another kiss. “I want to see the tattoo,” he said, and flipped Ronan over faster than Ronan could agree to it. He shivered roughly as he got to his elbows and knees and felt Adam kneel against the back of his thighs. It was nothing compared to Adam’s hands tracing down his back.

“Took you long enough to ask about it,” Ronan said.

“How does a vampire get a tattoo?”

“He dreams it onto his skin.”

“Fuck,” Adam repeated in the same reverence as before.

“Fuuuuuuck,” Ronan moaned when Adam’s mouth replaced his hands. He dropped his head down to his balled fists. Adam kept kissing his back as his hand came around Ronan’s side and worked his jeans open. He only pressed his palm against the embarrassing bulge in Ronan’s underwear for a second before leaving Ronan gasping with want to focus on pulling his jeans down all the way.

They had to untangle themselves to finish kicking their pants out of the way and when they came crashing back together, Adam had Ronan on his back, one hand wrapped around both of Ronan’s wrists above his head. “Is there anything I should know about _you_?” Adam asked, raising a fair brow with a teasing grin.

“God, no,” Ronan choked out. “And I wouldn’t care if there was.” He leaned up as far as he could go with his arms pinned and Adam met him halfway to kiss him back into the pillows. Adam let go of his wrists and Ronan’s hands were immediately on his hips, smoothing over the curve of his ass and down the back of his thighs as far as he could reach.

“Jesus, have you always looked like this?” Ronan asked, dragging his fingers up perfectly natural abs.

“Are you asking me if I bulked out after being attacked by a werewolf? No, I just work manual labor jobs,” Adam said, and Ronan didn’t have to look at him to know he was rolling his eyes.

Ronan wrapped his legs around Adam’s waist when Adam finally shifted between his legs, and he brought his arms over his face when Adam’s perfect fingers wrapped around his cock.

“No way, look at me,” Adam said, pulling one of Ronan’s arms down. He’d shifted to straddle one of Ronan’s thighs and was slowly grinding down on it as he pumped Ronan’s length.

“Fuck me,” Ronan groaned, and splayed his free hand over his face. Still, he kept his eyes on Adam.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Adam said, and really winked at Ronan like they were still just flirting with each other.

Had they actually just skipped the flirting stage? Ronan couldn’t remember, and he didn’t care.

Ronan pulled Adam down in another kiss and Adam’s body spread out over his like warm water over taking him. He felt his cock jump in Adam’s hold, but he managed not to come like a teenager with a boy in his room for the first time. Adam’s body was searing, every brush of skin making Ronan go light headed, much less what his hot mouth was doing as he licked into Ronan’s mouth, nipped at his lower lip, the edge of his jaw, the corner of his mouth.

Then Adam’s mouth found Ronan’s neck and Ronan swear he felt an impossible pulse react against his lips. Ronan moaned, head dropped back, and Adam only pressed closer, burying his face against Ronan’s neck until his teeth found Ronan’s collarbones and then the edges of his tattoo again.

“Adam,” Ronan said, strangled. The little shit only shifted his hand to grip a little tighter, move a little faster. But his hips were stuttering against Ronan’s leg too and when Ronan lifted his thigh a little, Adam moaned like it was something he was paid to do.

Definitely worth the slight backfire that Ronan discovered when it made his cock leak faster. When Adam pressed his teeth to the skin of Ronan’s neck again, Ronan came, for the first time in far too long, with Adam’s name spilling from his mouth. Just a breath later, Adam was following suite, mumbled words lost against Ronan’s skin.

“Can you do that again?” Ronan asked between gasps when Adam finally lifted his head.

“Give me ten more minutes and I can do all of it again.”

“Fuck,” Ronan groaned. “You are perfect.” He pushed Adam back onto his back and got his mouth on his chest finally.

  
  


“Can we exchange secrets?” Adam asked after the third round of really, really satisfying but still, infuriatingly not penetrative sex.

“Sure. Secrets are something I can barter in all night,” Ronan said. “You go first.”

“Keep the retaliation fair,” Adam warned him. “Will you tell me about how you got turned?”

Ronan chewed on his lower lip. “It’s...a lot of history. I guess my story is pretty straightforward. When I turned eighteen, my father bit me and I was a vampire.”

“What’s the complicated part?”

“I’m taking a follow up to my question now too,” Ronan said with a smile. He ran his fingers through Adam’s curls and let out an unnecessary breath. “I guess it was two fold. One, I’d only just learned what my father was. I knew he was a dreamer, like me, but I hadn’t realized he was a vampire too. He told me just a year before he turned me. He said he knew I was his legacy and he wanted to give me everything the world could offer us. The only problem was, I had an older brother. Not a dreamer, not my dad’s twin, the way I was. Not anything that my dad expected. And my dad just...didn’t turn him. He walked away from my brother, just like that.”

“Jesus,” Adam muttered. “What happened to your brother?”

“I should take a second follow up for that, but I don’t want to answer it, so I won’t.”

“Gotta keep something to yourself so I come back, huh?” Adam joked and Ronan would’ve ripped out anyone’s heart if they interrupted the smile Adam shot at him. “Your turn.”

“How old were you when you were...attacked, or bitten, or turned or whatever?” Ronan asked, rubbing his thumb up and down the bridge of Adam’s nose. It made his eyelids go droopy and he pressed closer.

“Seventeen. I had… My father had kicked me out of the house and I was hurt. I was hurt pretty badly. I stumbled into this thicket of trees that surrounded the trailer park I grew up in and...all of a sudden, there was this wolf on top of me. I thought it was going to kill me. I couldn’t fight back and everything hurt so badly. I don’t know anything about the wolf. I don’t know who they are as a human or what their reasoning was, or if maybe they saw the blood on my head already, but they just bit my shoulder and left. Left these nasty claw punctures too,” Adam said, gesturing to the three circular scars on either side of his waist.

“Your father...hurt you?” Ronan asked slowly, like he couldn’t believe it. Because he couldn’t. Adam was the best man he’d ever met and fathers were supposed to love their sons. There was no room between those two facts for Adam’s father to hurt him.

Adam scoffed. “Yeah, that’s a gentle way of putting it. He beat my ass from the time I was six. That night he…” Adam’s hand came up to his left ear, the deaf one. “He pushed me down the steps and I hit my head.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ronan breathed and then felt anger surge through his veins. His vision went red for a second before he remembered he was in his own bed and Adam was right against him. “What happened to him?”

Adam was silent for a while, fingers finding Ronan’s and pulling them to his chest. “I think the question about him hurting me was your follow up.”

“Adam,” Ronan said.

Adam let out a shaky breath. “Ask me a different way.”

Ronan thought about the thoughts rushing around in his head. About the way Adam’s eyes always darted away along with his interest when the conversation turned to his early wolf days. About the half finished conversation from the first shift at the Barns. “Have you ever killed someone and meant it?”

Adam fixed his eyes on the wall opposite them. “I went back to the trailer that night. Washed up. Burned the shirt that had been destroyed. Went to school the next day like nothing had happened. That night, the second night of the full moon, was the first time I shifted. I got back home early that morning and slept through school. When he got home in the middle of the afternoon, he was enraged. He could find the dumbest shit to be angry about. He put his hand around my neck and the next thing I knew, I was looking at a wolf’s jaws wrapped around his forearm.

“I still wasn’t sure what was happening to me. I don’t know if I even realized _I_ was the wolf. I ran outside and he followed after and he had this gun. Now, I know it wouldn’t do any good except maybe hurt, but I didn’t know that then. And he was outside, running after me, shooting at me. And I turned around and…” Adam’s jaw went tight, eyes pinched in at the sides. “I buried the body parts as much as I could. I guess I did alright because they still haven’t been found. Actually, since I ended up leaving that afternoon, they thought maybe he’d done something to me. All the news articles about us in this small town finally admitted what he was doing to me just so they could have this sensational headline about ‘Father Suspected of Killing Son, Self After Both Go Missing.’”

Ronan pulled Adam into his lap, made him sit up so they were more or less even. Adam pressed his face to Ronan’s neck. Ronan let him take a few moments to compose himself.

“What are the scars on your wrist from?” he asked finally.

Ronan looked at the pink gogues. “A nightmare I took out once.”

“Tell me more,” Adam said, and it was less a request and more a command.

Ronan supposed it was only fair after the story Adam had just hawked up.

“My father was murdered. By a monster hunter, yes, but more specifically by an assassin sent after him. I’m the one who found him. It wasn’t long after he turned me. In the face of eternity, a decade is nothing. Suddenly I was entirely alone. I knew my brother was aging and dying. All of my friends were already out of the picture. I didn’t have anyone but my father. I spent decades in a depression, unable to do anything but dream nightmares. I had no control over what I took out. Most of the time, it was less like I was taking it out and more like it was following me out. For a while, I was good at dreaming a decoy me. I could let the nightmare attack a fake me while I worked on killing it. But that night, I hadn’t. Luckily, I didn’t bring the creature with me. I think it would’ve killed me if I had. But I brought the gashes back. I don’t bleed in real life, but dreams aren’t real. I make them real. So the blood and the pain became real.”

“Fuck, Ronan,” Adam muttered. His hand slid down Ronan’s arms until he could curl his fingers over the worst of the mangled mess.

“What’s your biggest fear?” Ronan asked, because he felt appropriate while Adam was holding his.

“Losing myself. Being someone I don’t want to be. Compromising myself, no matter how good the reward is.”

Ronan made a noise like a hum, but more judgemental. “How’d that fare against you becoming a literal something you’re not?”

Adam laughed softly, though he didn’t seem very amused. “At first I felt a little lost and confused. But the longer I spent on my own, the more aware I became of who I actually was.”

“What did you do after you ran away?”

“My friend Blue, the one I was supposed to be driving up to meet, her family is full of witches and psychics and stuff. They were able to explain what was happening to me, what to expect. And they kept quiet about what happened. They helped me finish my GED mostly legally. One of the aunts worked for the private school I went to, so she was able to backdate my tests to before my disappearance.”

“Wow, wolf-boy, a private school?” Ronan teased, rubbing his hand along Adam’s arm.

“Shut up. It’s what I wanted. I wanted to be smart and rich. I wanted people to care about me. I didn't want to be trailer trash for forever. I was gonna go to Harvard. Be a senator by 25.”

“And now?”

Adam shrugged. “I’ve had to put Harvard on the back burner. I’ve only missed my first year of college. Lots of people take a gap year. Besides, it doesn’t really matter. I can’t be a senator and a werewolf.”

“Could be hot,” Ronan mused.

Adam clicked his tongue and shoved his elbow into Ronan’s ribs.

“Sorry Mr. President, the gentleman from Virginia ate our bill,” Ronan pressed.

Another genuine laugh escaped Adam’s chest and he quickly had a hand clamped over his mouth. Ronan could not-live in that laugh. He fought Adam’s hand away, which only made Adam laugh harder as it became a war of pinching and kicking and kissing to distract. By the time Ronan had Adam splayed out under him, each wrist trapped under a hand, and he’d kissed Adam enough that he was going lightheaded, he could feel exhaustion pulling at him. Between the exertion and honesty, Ronan felt like he could sleep for a few centuries.

“If I let go of you, are you gonna behave?” he asked.

Adam’s jaw was still square and defiant, even as he nodded. Ronan slowly released his wrists and Adam still reached out to pinch his hip, earning a swat on his from Ronan. They both laid together, sinking closer on the bed until they were pressed all the way along each other.

“If you’re gonna keep me,” Adam started.

“Stray that you are,” Ronan agreed.

“We’re gonna have to go out tomorrow and buy necessities.”

The thought of Adam planning to stay for any amount of time made something like warmth blossom in Ronan’s chest and spread all the way to the soles of his feet.

“Yeah, wolf-boy, we can do that,” he said with a very pleased smile. Adam turned to kiss his shoulder and Ronan kissed his hair and they fell asleep.


	5. A Storm From Behind the Mountains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Title from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

When Adam woke up, warm and sore and a little horrified at what Ronan was going to say, he found himself alone. It did not help the horrified feeling. However, there was a bird sitting on the desk in the bay windows. It seemed to be sunning itself under the desk lamp.

“Ronan?” Adam whispered, crawling out of the bed and tugging on his jeans again. Ronan had said some vampires shapeshifted into birds. Hadn’t he said he was fond of ravens himself? Adam petted his fingers over the bird's thin head and the bird preened up into his touch.

“Atom,” the bird croaked out and almost caused Adam to stumble back.

“Ronan?” he repeated. “Are you...stuck? Do you need help?” he asked. He froze as the bird flew into his hair and flapped its wings around his head. “That’s not an answer.”

“What are you doing?” a voice asked behind Adam.

Adam whirled around and the bird took off from his head, croaking out “Kerah,” this time, whatever that meant.

Ronan was in the doorway, holding a coffee mug and a glass of water, and looking as bemused as he ever had. The raven landed on his shoulder and snuggled its face under his jaw. “Good evening, Chainsaw,” Ronan said. He looked back at Adam expectantly.

“I was just getting dressed.”

“You needed to talk to my bird to do that?”

“He said my name.”

“She,” Ronan corrected. “Corvids are talkative. She’s very good at mimicking human speech.”

“Then what’s Kerah?”

Ronan crossed to the bed, throwing himself down against the pillows and offering the glass of water to Adam. “It’s a made up word from a made up language. It’s my name.”

“Huh.” Adam sat at the foot of the bed, across from Ronan. “Still though...my name. And a made up language. Is she…?”

“A dream? Yeah,” Ronan conceded. “One of my first intentional ones. She was a baby when I found her and I couldn’t leave her. So I brought her out.”

Adam nodded and picked at the comforter between his legs while Ronan drank. “About last night,” he began, and glanced up in time to see fear and pain slash across Ronan’s face. “Wait, that was a terrible way to start the conversation. I just wanted to say, I really enjoyed it. It… It felt right.”

It had, and picking up that Ronan wasn’t freaking out about it had made Adam begin to feel better about it all. Ronan had considerable life experience on him, and Adam was just an idiot who’d stumbled into his house and hadn’t been eaten by virtue of smelling bad. Part of him thought he’d wake up outside with the doors locked. Blue was always saying boys were only after one thing. Besides, who knew the morals of a vampire?

But the look on Ronan’s face just then had washed away all of his lingering, foolish doubts.

“It felt good to me too. And I meant it last night. You can stay as long as you want. Longer, even. I won’t complain,” Ronan said.

Adam grinned and ducked his face against the glass of water. “Good. I haven’t really made plans for the next shift yet, so you’re my best bet.”

Ronan kicked Adam’s thigh but grinned. “You have to clean up if you’re gonna stay here,” he said. “Shave that bird’s nest on your face a little.”

Adam pretended to be offended, but he had to agree. Without any plan to shift again, and moving from the full moon, it’d be best to pare down some of the mess on his face. “I don’t remember you complaining about it last night,” he said, even as he stood up and crossed to the bathroom.

“You gave me beard burn on my thighs and I don’t have skin that breaks that easily,” Ronan called after him.

“Still weren’t complaining!” Adam dug out a pocket knife from his jeans and flipped open the straight edge that was folded next to the knife before setting it aside. He wet his face and lathered soap in his hands until he could pat it on his cheeks.

When he lifted his head and found Ronan leaning on the doorway, he said, “I figured you don’t grow hair, so you wouldn’t need shaving cream,” he explained.

“A good guess,” Ronan answered. “Where’d you get that from?” he asked, nodding at the knife as Adam held it up to his cheek.

“It’s the only gift I’ve ever gotten in my life,” he explained, voice garbled as he held his skin taunt and kept his mouth open. “My uncle happened to be around when I was turning seven and he gave me this.” He shook some of the soap into the sink. “I think he mostly forgot about my birthday. My parents definitely wouldn’t have told him. This just happened to be in his pocket.” He shaved a sharp line at the top of his beard and rinsed off the blade before starting in on thinning out the rest. “Definitely inappropriate for a seven year old. But clearly it meant the world to me.”

“If you had family…” Ronan started, and then stopped himself. Adam watched him think over his words from the corner of his eye. “Why didn’t anyone stop what was happening to you?”

Adam hadn’t considered, after all the things he’d told Ronan, that this would be what he was most hung up on. Adam wondered what a family unit that made something like this seem unthinkable was like. He’d wished for an older brother when he was a kid. He’d wished for someone to swoop in and actually say he was adopted. Fat chance of that. Every year he looked more and more like his father. He’d wanted to be loved so badly and imagined it so many different ways that now it was just a fantasy he could hardly put a picture to. 

He shrugged and then grimaced when it meant he cut too close to the skin in a section.“I don’t know. We were all too poor to take on anything else. Everyone lived across the country. No one knew what was happening,” he said. “I try not to think about it.”

Ronan glared at the opposite wall and Adam sighed, switching to the other side of his face. “Why can’t I see you in the mirror?” he asked, to distract the vampire.

“Because that’s a vampire myth that’s true.”

“Sure, but only because mirrors used to be silver lined. It was a pure metal or whatever. Most mirrors are backed with aluminum or foil or something now.”

“Sure, now. But this house is older than either of us, which is saying something when it comes to me. It still has a silver backing.”

Adam hummed and finished working on his beard while Ronan ran a washcloth over his head and looked in the mirror even though he couldn’t see himself. Adam ducked his head down to wash his face off and lifted it with a towel pressed over his jaw.

“Come on, don’t be a tease,” Ronan joked, reaching for the towel. “Show me what I got myself into.”

Adam let him take the towel and glanced in the mirror to make sure everything was even. The thinner beard made him look younger, like it always did, and gave just a bit more definition to his face.

“God, you’re so fuckin’ handsome,” Ronan growled, pressing Adam up against the wall. Adam preened at the compliment and let Ronan steal several kisses before he ducked out from under his arm.

“I’ve actually got to get dressed,” he said.

“No you don’t,” Ronan answered, following him back to the bed.

Adam shot him a look and pulled his flannel shirt on, buttoning it up before he laid back over the comforter next to Ronan.

“So, what’s the plan for tonight?” Ronan asked.

“I don’t know the area. I just need some clothes. If there’s a thrift store or something, that’ll be fine.”

“And then what?” 

Adam shrugged. “I figured you’d want to come home. I don’t want to waste your night.”

“I want to take you somewhere,” Ronan said. “If we can find a thrift shop open in the middle of the night, that is.”

“You can take me wherever, even if we don’t find a shop open in the middle of the night,” Adam promised. He couldn’t help a peal of laughter as Ronan leaned over and straddled him.

“In that case, let’s take a few extra minutes,” he said.

Adam made sure his mouth was too busy to argue this time.

  
  


As it turned out, Adam, as ever, was a keen sleuth in hunting down a skeevy shop that was open way too late to be after reputable customers. But they’d been able to get in and grab a few shirts and jeans and a pack of underwear without anyone trying to sell them something to get high with.

Ronan had let Adam throw the bag in the back of the car but hadn’t folded himself into the driver’s seat immediately, which was a shame because it was a beautiful sight.

“It’s just a few minutes the other direction. There won’t be parking,” Ronan had said, and started off down the road, a lazy sure silhouette in the night.

The town was familiar to Adam, but not familiar enough that he trusted himself to let Ronan get too far ahead of him. He chalked it up to it being the same small town feeling his hometown had left in every crevice of his chest. A used up town made for leaving.

As it turns out, this small town had a surprise. Adam knew a drag when he saw one. Bars all looked, sounded, and smelled the same whether he could see into them or not, and the building at the end of the road was definitely a club. Pulsing lights and throbbing music spilled onto the street ahead of them and Ronan wrapped an arm around Adam’s waist.

It was odd to see him out of the house. Everything about the past few days had been so insular that Adam hadn’t taken time to think about doing something like this with Ronan, or going to get dinner, or doing grocery shopping. Not that, he knew, he should be planning out his future or anything. It was just that Ronan seemed like a permanent fixture of the house. In the colorful glow of a club, he looked like a different creature entirely, at once sharper and safer. He was more human out in the world. Adam couldn’t decide if it was a camouflage or not.

They’d almost made it to the door when a raucous group came out of the alleyway. There were five of them, all good looking, all tangled together like they couldn’t operate separately. Even through the alcohol and the sweat, Adam could smell their scent. It was the pack from the road.

And the vampire.

On a good day, non-werewolves couldn’t recognize a human from their wolf form and vice versa, much less outside of a very bright club in the middle of the night. Further from the full moon, Adam smelt less like a dog--Ronan had told him as much earlier in the evening with his face pressed up against Adam’s ribs--and Adam wasn’t sure the vampire would even remember what he had smelt like.

The pack was good looking. Adam could guess which man went with which wolf. There was a handsome black man with light eyes and broad shoulders. Beside him, as when they were wolves, was a tall Asian man with silver hair and a bored glance. The two others--brothers, as Adam thought--were almost the same height with the same blonde hair and dark eyes. One, with larger ears and a more spacey look, didn’t have his shirt on, so Adam could see a tattoo, or maybe a scar, under his collar bones that read ‘Nice Doggie’ along with an o-collar. Adam felt fury burn hot through his body at the disrespect, but the way the man lounged against the vampire’s side didn’t suggest he’d been forced into any of it.

“Ronan Lynch, you son of a bitch,” the vampire cackled, tearing off ugly white sunglasses that he was wearing in the dead of the night for some reason. He stuck them on the large eared werewolf’s head. Adam was more than pleased to see a bandage wrapped around the vampire’s mid-forearm.

“Kavinsky,” Ronan snarled back.

“It could still be K to you.” The vampire’s eyes tracked over Ronan hungrily but came up short as he followed Ronan’s arm to Adam’s waist. “Who the fuck is this? Some new fun? I thought you were out of that game.” He reached out for Adam’s jaw, with the bandaged arm, the same one he’d used to hold Adam’s head as a wolf, and Adam caught his wrist, cinched his fingers tight around the thin bones.

“I wouldn’t want you to get hurt. Again,” he added, glancing at the bandage.

“Oh, not just a blood bag,” the vampire laughed. He ripped his wrist away and appraised Adam. Adam thought for sure the vampire would figure out who he was. “I always thought you were more doglike than anyone you’d go for,” he said, eyes flickering up to Ronan.

“Then you can’t still be mad I wasn’t interested in you,” Ronan pointed out. “You’re about as mangy as they come.”

The other vampire bared his teeth in a half hearted hiss. “I’ve got to say, I hate that you’re copying my style.”

“You’re hardly the first vampire to get a pack around you,” Ronan said. “And it’s pretty new for you anyway.”

“Well, their changes are new. You know they’ve been around for forever,” Kavinsky corrected.

“You should know not to throw that word around when it isn’t true.”

Kavinsky sucked his teeth and threw an exasperated arm wide. “They lasted longer than any other blood bags.”

“We’re standing right here,” the Asian werewolf said, cutting his glance to the vampire.

Kavinsky waved a hand at him. “So good I had to save them for a while longer,” he soothed, looking at the man to make sure it was enough sweet bullshit. “You know Jiang,” he said to Ronan. “Or, at least, your bother does.”

Adam glanced up in time to see Ronan’s eyes narrow. It didn’t make sense. Ronan had said his brother hadn’t been turned. And he hadn’t given a date for when he’d actually been alive, but Adam had assumed it’d been decades on decades at least. And if Jiang was only a new turn, he still couldn’t have cross paths with Ronan’s brother.

“You sent me after him,” Jiang said. “Stop saying that like he found me.”

“You sent someone after my brother?” Ronan growled.

Kavinsky ignored him. “Swan,” he said, gesturing to the black man next to Jiang. “And Skov and Proko,” he finished, gesturing to his other side. “Skov’s older, but you can’t really tell. Too much coffee, I guess.”

Skov rolled his eyes before training them back on Adam. “You wouldn’t happen to be the wolf we saw the other night, huh?” Swan asked, like he could read Skov’s mind.

Adam stiffened.

Kavinsky slowly turned to look at him full on.

Ronan stepped half in front of him. “He’s not from around here. Just passing through.”

“And already had his hand down your pants. Just like one of mine, indeed. Or yours down his. I don’t really care who plays bitch,” Kavinsky said.

“He’s too cute,” Proko said with a scoff.

Kavinsky curled his fingers in Proko’s hair and tugged his head aside to kiss his neck. “I think you’re plenty cute, as long as you’re not fishing for compliments,” he said.

Proko shuddered and went weak in Kavinsky’s attention.

“Why waste good blood bags?” Ronan asked, a grimace cutting across his mouth at the display.

“Oh, they’re still perfectly usable,” Kavinsky said, glancing at Ronan for just a second before he sank his teeth into Proko’s neck.

Adam and Skov both stepped forward, reaching out to stop Kavinsky, but Ronan pulled Adam back.

It didn’t matter. Something wasn’t right about it. The smell was wrong. Proko passed fine as a wolf, hell Adam had seen him, could recognize his smell. But his blood was just blood. There was nothing special to it.

His brother was a clue too. Skov clearly knew some rule about vampires and werewolves trying to eat each other. Maybe the one Ronan had introduced Adam to, maybe the reverse that Adam had learned the hard way. Regardless, he also didn’t want the vampire’s teeth in his brother’s neck. And though he’d pulled himself back too, Adam had seen it.

Kavinsky pulled away a minute later and wiped his hand over his mouth. He kept his other arm around Proko’s back until Skov was there to hold his brother up.

“You should try it with your pet sometime.”

“I do enough biting for the both of us,” Adam interjected. He could feel Ronan’s surprised gaze fall on him, but he didn’t look away from Kavinsky.

Adam didn’t miss the way Kavinsky’s fingers glanced off his bandages, even as he said, “Hot, Lynch.”

“I had plans for the night,” Adam continued. “They don’t involve Russian knock offs of Lestat, so vaporize into glitter or whatever it is you’re halfway decent at and leave us alone.”

Swan snarled at him, but didn’t make a move to challenge Adam. Adam admired his mouth full of teeth and was thankful he didn’t have to spit that many out himself.

Kavinsky sneered too before his eyes snapped up to Ronan. “I’ve missed this. And now that you think we’re playing even with our guard dogs, why don’t we have another battle night.”

“You destroyed ten acres last time,” Ronan said.

“The local kids had a field day with talk about aliens and crop circles. I did this shitty town a favor.” Kavinsky rolled his eyes when Ronan didn’t budge. “But, fine, further away from your precious farm. I’m sure all your protections are still keeping me from it.”

“Damn straight.”

“Let’s not pretend like there’s anything straight between us, Lynch. I’ll tell you where. You won’t be able to miss it.”

Ronan’s jaw went tight as he watched Kavinsky walk away.

“Which one of you is it gonna be?” Adam asked. Skov, already dragging his brother after Kavinsky didn’t turn to answer.

Swan stepped forward. “We’ll all be there. But if you make trouble, you’ll be answering to me,” he said.

Adam pouted out his lower lip. “And yet, it wasn’t you your douchebag vampire put his teeth into.”

Jiang hooked a finger in Swan’s collar and pulled him away as Swan bared his teeth again.

“Are you fucking insane?” Ronan hissed when the whole pack had disappeared down the street into some other alley. “Why are you picking fights?

Adam let out a breath and stumbled back a step as he went very lightheaded very quickly. Ronan’s hands came to his hips to steady him. The rush was enough that he couldn’t even berate Ronan for his own hypocrisy, talking about picking fights.

“Was that some kind of alpha-wolf bullshit?” Ronan asked.

“That study’s been debunked by the original author. Wolves aren’t like that,” Adam corrected automatically.

“You’re not a real wolf. You’re a werewolf and men are certainly like that.”

Adam couldn’t argue that. “It wasn’t an alpha thing. I just…” He’d wanted to protect Ronan. Even if it was just through stupid jabs, even if he didn’t understand what a battle night was, or why there was a guard dog there, even if Kavinsky scared the shit out of him. It wasn’t that Ronan wasn’t holding his own. He was. Clearly he was more bored of the situation than anything. But Adam still had the urge to keep him safe and keep the entire pack away from him. “I don’t know. It happened.”

Ronan watched the street again for a moment before looking at Adam, eyes wide and soft. “I didn’t know he was back in the area. I would’ve been watching for him. That night, you even asked me about other vampires and I thought about him. But he’s been gone for so long.”

“He had to find a werewolf who would change his whole pack like that,” Adam said. “It would take a lot of self control to turn four people without killing any of them or not turning one or two.”

“You can get attacked by a werewolf and not turn?” Ronan asked. Adam could tell he was still tense, still upset. He just couldn’t tell if he was upset about Kavinsky or having walked Adam right into him.

“Sure, same way a vampire can keep a human around to keep feeding without turning them. Have no intention of killing them.”

“So all turnings are actually unintentional? They’re accidents because the humans didn’t die.”

“Something like that,” Adam agreed.

“Oh, God, so someone wanted to kill you?”

“Don’t take it too personally. We all have to eat. Point being, in a case like this, a wolf can purposefully turn someone that they want to kill at the same time. Some older wolves can do it. It just takes a lot of control, like I said. A lot of intention. It’s difficult because, as a wolf, you’re led by your intention. Control and thought are sparse to begin with, especially something as human as don’t kill. To overcome a base wolf instinct for a very human thought takes years of practice.”

“I don’t even want to know where Kavinsky found someone like that,” Ronan said in a breath. He ran his hand over his head and then grabbed Adam’s wrist. “Come on, we should get home. I have a feeling Gansey’s about to call.”

“Why?” Adam asked, as they started back to the car, the promise of a night out with Ronan fading behind them.

“Kavinsky isn’t gonna send a letter about where he wants to do this stupid battle. There’ll be an uptick in animal deaths, creepy things carved in trees, maybe even some missing people.”

“All for a fist fight?”

“It’s not really a fist fight,” Ronan said.

He fell quiet again until they were in the car and pulled onto the main road. “Kavinsky is the other dreamer. The only one, other than my dad, that I ever knew about.”

Adam frowned and thought on it, but wasn’t sure where to go from there. There was still so much he didn’t know about Ronan and the way he lived. He wanted to understand it all, but that was a whole lot of information.

“The battle...it’s going to be dream creatures. It always is. We used to race in dream cars. We used to bring out the most real objects. It was always never enough. Eternity will bore you out of your mind and morals,” Ronan explained. “He thought we could fight in our subconscious. The monsters came out and we controlled them while we slept. I brought a night terror. He brought a dragon. We wiped out ten acres of a forest behind the Barns. I had to make it storm for a week straight to put out all the fires. I spent years dreaming up animals that could live in charred remains, eat trees that had been splintered and were dying. I made my own ecosystem. But I can’t do that again. I have to stop him before it gets to that.”

“So you’ll follow his path of destruction through your park ranger friend and attack before he calls a...fucking duel or date or whatever?”

“Tracking Kavinsky is not hard. You just find the most inane, gaudy, hedonistic bullshit happening around and he’s at the center of it.”

Ronan’s fingers tightened on the wheel and Adam watched his face shift in the dashboard lights. It was like watching him outside of the club, but now all his sharp lines were pointing to a focus, not a grin. He was slipping into the dangerous predator again.

“What does he want us there for then?”

“Werewolves?” Ronan asked, glancing at Adam and bathing his face in the blue light from the radio. “He didn’t have the pack last time we did it. But I imagine he wants to make sure we don’t renege. If I were to dream a sentient monster up, it could keep fighting while I woke up and put a stake through his heart. He’ll probably keep his whole pack around him to make sure I don’t.”

“What’s to say he doesn’t sic the dogs on you?” Adam asked.

“Well, I think that’d be you,” Ronan said, looking at him again. “I trust you.”

“I don’t have a whole pack on my side,” Adam pointed out.

“I think you only have to worry about Swan and Jiang.”

“Don’t underestimate a wolf,” Adam warned. “Skov and Proko wouldn’t be there if they weren’t loyal to him. It’s not innate to werewolves. Much less, to be loyal to a vampire like that. They all want to be there.”

Ronan didn’t answer for so long, Adam had to look at him this time. Ronan glanced at him from the corner of his eye. “Do you want to be here?” he asked.

Adam sagged back in his seat and reached over for one of Ronan’s tense hands. “Yeah,” he said, brushing his fingers over Ronan’s palm. “I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why does Chainsaw get introduced in this chapter? Because "the bird in his hands was Ronan's heart laid bare"
> 
> Why'd I make Skov and Proko brothers? That's nobody's business but the Turks.  
> (Broskis, do you know the only description of all four of them, across five books and a novella and short story, is that Proko has big ears? That's it for all of them. Big sad.)


	6. This World That Keeps Trying to Destroy Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Title from "Ninth House" by Leigh Bardugo (2019)

In the woods somewhere near the Lynch Estate, but not on it, there’s a body decomposing under leaves and dirt and worms. A young man’s bones sink into the same oblivion that deer bones and coyote bones and rabbit bones do.

He was a greedy, sad man’s sacrifice. A best friend who meant nothing more than what he could offer in the end. He’d been so much more than either of those things. He’d been a brother, a skater, an eager student--even if his attendance record was a little shaky. He’d been deeply loved and then lost, with no answers.

As a ghost now, with some kind of mission tying him back to Earth, stuck in the Lynch estate with a curse on top of it all, he could still be so much. A friend to a very lonely vampire. A seer of the infinite circle of time. A harbinger when he needed to be.

He knew who was at the door before the incessant knocking started. He was standing in Ronan’s room, watching Ronan be as close to dead as he ever was, arms wrapped around Adam’s waist, legs tangled together over the blanket. Adam, in contrast, was so alive and warm that Noah could feel it sapping his own energy. His arms were folded over his chest, pressed between their bodies. He was the one who mumbled and turned over when the knocking didn’t stop. He was the one who rolled out of bed and ran a hand through his hair tiredly before pulling on a shirt.

The bruising from the violent shifts were fading, leaving his ribs a dingy yellow color against his dark tan. He hid the evidence, glanced at Ronan who was still dead asleep, and headed for the door.

Noah could feel his apprehension, and couldn’t blame him, though he knew there was nothing to be worried about this time. However, typically, opening someone’s door during their night when they have no discernible friends (but a pack of enemies) could be daunting if you were, for example, a tired werewolf and not an omnipotent ghost.

Noah followed behind Adam as he rounded the hall and got in front of the door. The man took a deep breath and pulled the door open. For a moment, nothing happened. Adam blinked at the small woman in front of him. She glared back.

“Adam Michael Parrish, what the fuck is wrong with you?!” she finally shouted.

Adam jumped and closed the door a little bit. “Keep your voice down. I’m sorry! I just… Wait, how the hell did you find me?”

The woman held up her phone. “Your GPS finally pinged last night. I thought you were dead, Adam!”

Adam looked a little remorseful as he scuffed his heel against the floor. He couldn’t meet the woman’s eyes and Noah couldn’t blame him. “I’m not dead,” he finally said.

“That makes one of us,” Noah said.

“Shut up,” the woman ordered, holding up one finger over Adam’s shoulder. Adam glanced behind himself and then looked at her.

“You asked for an explanation.”

“What? Not you, the ghost behind you.” She let out an irritated huff and then crossed her arms over her chest again. “Are you going to let me in?”

“Ghost?” Adam started to say, looking around again. He jumped back when the woman shoved her way in anyway.

“What the hell have you been doing?” she asked, sitting heavily on the couch.

“Blue, you can’t stay here. Listen… I’m not alone here. I’m not just squatting.”

Blue raised an eyebrow. It was, in fact, dyed blue, but Noah knew that wasn’t where her name came from. “You’re staying with someone.” Statement, not question.

Adam made an irritated noise, flapped his hands, and then sat down next to her in a whirl of motion. “Listen, the car broke down just a mile up the road. I went looking for help and got more than I bargained for. There’s no cell service out here and then the moon happened and I kind of forgot to call you, alright? But you have to go.”

Blue scoffed and batted his hands from her as he urged her up. “What’s really happening, Parrish?” she asked. “You didn’t just  _ forget  _ to call  _ me _ . Not before a full moon. And now what? There’s no cell service here so we’re not going to talk until you decide you’re bored and hit the road again?”

Adam brought an exasperated hand up to his face. “No, of course not. I’m sorry. A lot of things happened.”

“He’s fucking a vampire,” Noah explained. Blue’s eyes snapped up to him so fast he understood the steps back Adam had taken.

“ _ What _ ?” she demanded.

“Nothing bad! I’m fine, honest. I got a little sick one night--”

“Not you!” Blue snapped again. “Can’t you hear him?”

“No, he’s never seen me, except when I dip into his dreams.”

“Hear who?” Adam asked. He got up and followed Blue over to where Noah was sitting on the bar counter. 

Blue waved her arm at Noah. “The entire ghost sitting in front of you.”

Adam looked at her like she might be crazy. Blue glared at him and reached for Noah’s wrist.

“That’s not going to do any--” Noah stopped as he watched color come back to his skin. He sank heavily onto the counter so he was actually sitting on it. He could feel Blue’s warm hand on his, see the difference in color between their fingers. He was real again.

“Oh my God,” he breathed and stared at his arms.

“Oh my God?” Adam said and stared at the ghost. “They’re both you. The man in my dreams, and the rotting corpse. You’re the ghost he joked about the other night. You’re real. You’re what lives in the spare room.”

“ _ Lives _ is a strong word,” Noah said.

“Who are you?” Adam asked.

“Names are a powerful thing.”

Blue hummed in agreement beside them. “If this isn’t who you meant you’re staying with, who else is here?”

“The person who owns the house,” a deep voice growled from behind them.

Blue and Adam whirled around and Blue’s fingers tightened around Noah’s wrist.

“Who the fuck are you?” Ronan demanded. He’d stopped walking into the room and hovered near the doorway.

“My friend, Blue. The one I was supposed to be meeting last week,” Adam said.

Ronan glanced at him, fingers clenching and unclenching by his thigh. “I guess you finally called her.”

“The hell he did,” Blue said and jabbed an elbow into Adam’s ribs. When Ronan’s eyes narrowed and lit with anger, Adam crossed the kitchen to rub his arm.

“Blue, this is Ronan. This is his house. He’s the one who let me stay here when my car broke down.”

“He’s the vampire,” Blue said.

Adam looked taken aback. “How do you know that?”

She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at Noah.

“What are you doing to him?” Ronan asked, jaw still tight.

“I’m redirecting energy to him. He’s doing what he wants with it.” She looked over her shoulder at him and he smiled cheerily back. “He clearly wants to be seen.”

“Who doesn’t?” Noah agreed.

“Who are you?” Ronan asked again, clearly unsatisfied with Adam’s answer.

“He told you. My name’s Blue. I know Adam.”

“What are you?” Ronan finally clarified.

Blue ground her teeth together and glared at Ronan.

“She’s a witch,” Noah said after he got tired of the peacocking. “Not very powerful, more of a mirror for other things. That part’s powerful.”

Blue shot a betrayed look at him and let go of his wrist, but Noah didn’t fade like he thought he would. She was still directing energy to him. “I came here to make sure Adam wasn’t dead. Actually, I came here to find his body, but he answered the door so I didn’t have to.”

“Blue, I don’t know what else you want me to say. I’m sorry. Other things happened.”

“Oh my God, you are sleeping with him,” Blue said in disbelief.

Ronan and Adam both snapped identical glowers up to him. “I don’t lie very often, ma’am,” he said, looking at Blue.

“What is wrong with you, Adam? Do you know how dangerous that is?”

“No, actually. Your family neglected to tell me that the made up feuds between vampires and werewolves were born out of a real danger we pose to each other. I bit a vampire and vomited for an hour.”

“That’s dramatic,” Noah said. “I heard you, it wasn’t that long.”

“And I could  _ kill  _ Ronan if he bit me? Don’t you think that’s more important to know than how to scratch my hide on a tree? I could’ve hurt anyone I decided to get weird with. How many other monsters does it apply to? To humans? I’m a bio weapon and you’re mad at me for sleeping with someone I like?”

“I’m not mad at you for sleeping with him! I’m mad that you decided sleeping with him was more important than letting me know you were safe!”

“I’m standing right here,” Ronan growled. “Adam wasn’t lying. And he wasn’t only talking about his sex life that’s kept him busy. There’s no reception out here so he couldn’t call you. By the time we got his truck hauled in, he’d had a full moon to contend with and ran into a pack of werewolves hunting in the same woods as him, a vampire that was trying to dognap him, an illness that knocked him the fuck out, and a ghost giving him freaky warnings.” His eyes went back to Noah. “Stop that shit.”

Noah shrugged and shook his head.

“I took him into town last night and I’m sure he meant to call you, but he ran into the pack and vampire again. It’s been a rough few days.”

Blue looked between the two of them. “God, you two must’ve been meant for each other,” she scoffed. Her hard eyes flickered between them before she threw her hands up in the air. “Fine! If someone else wants to make sure you don’t eat poison mushrooms--again--all the better for me.” She hopped up on the kitchen counter next to Noah and he glowed in approval and happiness.

“The nose knows, huh?” Ronan muttered. Adam elbowed him in the ribs.

“Is your scrying any better out here?” Blue asked, kicking her heels against the cabinet under her.

Noah got to watch Ronan’s eyes slide over to Adam and narrow. It was a look he’dd been on the receiving end of many times and it was much more enjoyable from the outside.

“Haven’t really tried,” Adam said with a shrug. “Like he said, I’ve been busy. Besides, there’s nothing to scry for.”

“All this magic in the air and you can’t find something you want to scry into?” Blue asked dubiously.

“It’s dangerous. Especially so close to a full moon.”

“You’re a clairvoyant wolf?” Ronan asked.

Adam let out a long breath and then nodded. “I was clairvoyant beforehand. I hadn’t known very long and I wasn’t very good at it. Blue’s family even thought it would disappear with the change, but it only got stronger.”

“Maura thinks it's because of the woods. She thinks that’s why you’re so drawn to them.”

“That doesn’t make any sense though. I never have been before,” Adam insisted, like an old argument Noah had missed several years of.

“Time is a flat circle. Everything that was, is and everything that will be, already has been,” he said instead.

“You’re the worst,” Ronan groaned.

“Gansey’s at the door,” Noah said, right as the doorbell rang. Ronan dashed for the front entryway, but Gansey was already letting himself in, nose in a journal with pictures taped to the pages and ignoring Ronan in favor of ducking under his arm. 

“Ronan, Ronan, Ronan, I came as fast as I could, but I dug something up right after. When it rains it pours, y’know? Anyway, in one of the marked off forests I found one of your white deer--” Gansey finally looked up and fell silent. “Oh. You’ve got...company?”

“One of them was just leaving,” Ronan growled.

“‘Fraid not. The whole permission-to-enter thing only counts towards you.”

Gansey’s eyebrows shot up and he looked at Blue with a few dozen stars in his eyes. “I’m Gansey,” he said, offering his hand out to her.

She raised a pink eyebrow. “Is that all there is?”

“That’s all there is. How do you know Ronan?”

“I don’t. I was looking for him,” she said, nodding to Adam.

Adam took a step back. “I broke down a few days ago. I’ve been staying here,” he explained.

“Oh my God, Ronan! You said you didn’t do that anymore!” Gansey said, betrayed, as he turned to look at Ronan.

“Jesus, Gansey, it’s not like that.”

“He’s not eating me,” Adam assured.

“Wellll,” Ronan said and earned himself a baleful look from Adam.

“It’s a complicated story,” Adam said.

“How savvy are you about what’s going on in this house?” Blue asked.

Ganseys’s eyes pinched in at the sides. “How savvy are  _ you _ ?”

“The answer for you both is very savvy,” Noah said.

“Adam’s a werewolf.”

“Blue!” Adam objected. “You can’t just go around telling people that!”

“What? He was going to find out anyway if you plan on moving in here.”

“Oh my God, please get over it!”

“Can everyone just shut the fuck up?!” Ronan shouted. Everyone did fall silent.

“Here’s a recap,” Noah finally said. He hovered between everybody. “Ronan’s a vampire and lives here. Mopes here, whatever.. Adam broke down a few days ago and came here to use a phone, which doesn’t really work. He ended up entranced and stayed here until the night of the full moon. Problem being, he’s a werewolf. He shifted and came upon Ronan eating a body. They freaked out and then had to have a heart-to-heart. Blue is a witch. She’s looking for Adam because he was supposed to spend the full moon with her. Gansey is looking for a dead Welsh king and got lost on the way. He’s found some of Ronan’s deer. Oh, also, Ronan dreams things and makes them real. In a literal sense, not an inspirational sense.”

Everyone stared at the ghost and he faded a little before their eyes. “I just thought it’d help. The introductions didn’t seem to do much.”

Ronan looked at Gansey finally. “What about my deer?”

“You know, those big white ones you dreamed up? I found them in the park. It was in a closed down section of the part, so no one else was around. I was looking for the tomb and there was a whole herd of them. They were stock still. It was like a painting. And then all of a sudden, they ran and disappeared.”

Ronan shook his head. “That’s not possible. I didn’t make that many,” he said. None have really gone missing from here.”

“I’m telling you, I saw them. It was only a few days ago, maybe close to the full moon. Sorry, did Noah say you’re a werewolf?” he asked, looking over at Adam.

Adam held up his hands because he’d already backed himself against the couch. “A very domesticated one,” he appeased.

“That is amazing. I’ve seen some pretty horrific things in the park and I know there’s enough literature out there about werewolves, but I’ve never met one to confirm.”

“Not all horrible things are done by wolves.”

“Of course not. But these things were not done by humans either.”

“Maybe you just haven’t met enough humans.”

Gansey shrugged amiably. “Perhaps not. But I’ve met even fewer werewolves.”

Blue stifled a laugh and her hand shot up to her mouth at the noise that did escape, eyes wide and apologetic at Adam.

“Gansey, focus,” Ronan said. “You were talking about your king and my deer.”

“Oh, right. I was following this abandoned trail I found in an old journal and it came to this clearing and right in the middle of it was a herd of your deer. Six or seven of them, at least. I didn’t want to scare them off, so I couldn’t move to look for more.”

“You think your ancient king is buried in a clearing in a national forest?” Blue asked dubiously.

Gansey shook his head. “No, I think he’s buried under it. On the other side, there was a rocky pit. If this map is correct and accurate, he’s buried into the side of the cliff. Now, I think I could dig into the clearing, carefully, to get to it, but I’m scared of the cliff giving away.”

“If only we had someone who liked to dig,” Blue said and cut her gaze to Adam.

“That’s a stereotype,” Adam said, but couldn’t argue more. It was a delightful primal urge and he wouldn’t be made to feel weird about giving into it when he was a wolf.

“Wait, tell me more about it. Are there a lot of differences between how you are now and how you are when you’re a wolf?” Gansey asked, looking to Adam again.

“Well, there are qualities that don’t transfer over, but I think I’m still pretty much me.”

“What qualities don’t transfer over?” Blue snorted.

“I mean, I don’t want belly rubs. I don’t need to be petted,” Adam said defensively. He realized it was a bad idea when Ronan reached over to scratching his fingers over his belly and Adam couldn’t help the shudder that followed. “Stop it,” he snapped, shoving his hand away. “I just mean, I’m me all the time, barring some violent shift or something. It’s just about control. We’re not mindless.”

Gansey nodded and jotted something down in his notebook. “How many werewolves do you think there are out there?”

“Well, don’t all know each other, so I couldn’t tell you,” Adam said.

“Gansey, the deer,” Ronan cut in.

“Right. Look, I took a few pictures.” He handed Ronan the journal with the images taped in it and finally looked at Noah. “Hey, Noah. How’s all this upheaval been for you?” he asked.

Noah shrugged. “Means Ronan doesn’t bug me so much. And I’ve had full run of the house recently. Adam wears him out, he sleeps all day.”

Adam blushed and Ronan glared at Noah. “He means it’s been a long week,” Ronan said.

“I bet it has,” Blue answered.

“These aren’t mine.” Ronan was more than happy to change the topic, but it was also just important to say. “Look at these antlers. Mine are silver. These are white. Off white. Whatever. And these eyes are wrong. They’re too dark.”

“White deer aren’t particularly naturally occurring,” Gansey said, looking at the picture next to Ronan. “What do you think they are.”

“They’re probably related to your king,” Blue suggested. “Magic lingers in spaces forever. If your king is as hidden as you say, he’s probably enchanted too. His environment would be full of magic after so long.”

Gansey hummed thoughtfully. “Tell me more. What should we expect if we dig him up?”

Blue shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten the low-down on what you’re doing. But magic breeds magic and it all has set rules. Magic creates at the expense of something else. If there are magical deer running around, it’s possible your king is dead dead, no chance of coming back. Why are you looking for him? Is he prophesied to come back?”

Gansey looked a little sheepish and shifted from foot to foot. “Well, no. Not for me. But I was brought back once and when I was coming back, a voice said it was because of Glendower. So I’m trying to find him to…”

“Thank him?” Blue suggested.

“Figure out what your destiny is,” Adam said. “Find out ‘why you?’ ‘Why then?’”

Gansey looked at him, steady and easy and nodded. “Exactly. There must be a higher reason Glendower specifically wanted to save me.”

“And you think there’s a favor involved,” Noah reminded.

“Right. If I can wake and face Glendower, I can ask him a favor.”

“What favor do you want?” Adam asked.

Again, Gansey hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ll know when I see him.”

“Wait, you’re tearing up a national park to find a dead king to ask him a favor and you don’t even know what you want to ask?” Blue asked.

“I’ll know when I see him!” Gansey insisted.

Ronan sighed and ran a hand over his face. “We’re all going to get roped into helping you, aren’t we?”

“Think of how much easier this would be with all of us,” Gansey said. “Dig crew,” he said, gesturing to Adam. “A witch for magic,” Blue, “Me, the expert, and you, the one attached to weird deer guarding him.”

“They’re not my deer.”

“But your idea came from somewhere. Something put those deer in your head, so close to the park, and you brought them to life. Now here’s another variation, probably from the same thing that gave you the idea,” he said.

Ronan groaned and toppled over the back of the couch so his legs hung over the back and he was laying on the seats. “Fine. But we have to wait until the sun goes down.”

“I’d have said that anyway. It’ll be much more difficult to tear up a national park in broad daylight,” Gansey agreed. He sat on the arm of the chair, shoes in the seat, and watched Ronan.

“I didn’t sign up for this,” Blue said. “But I’m very intrigued and I have to figure out if Adam’s swallowed a femur recently, so fine.”

“I didn’t swallow anything.”

“Wellll,” Blue and Ronan said at the same time.

“And I don’t even know if I can turn. We’re four days out of the full moon.”

“But it’s a blue moon month,” Blue said. “You’ll be fine. The forest will help.”

Noah wouldn’t be able to follow them into the night, into the park, into the forest. He wouldn’t be able to watch them dig and dig and dig. And he couldn’t give them advice about what was going to happen.

He couldn’t tell them the forests were littered with bodies and they were all full of their own magic. He couldn’t say that not all magic was kind and not all ghosts offered favors and not all second lives were the end. He couldn’t tell them about curses and swallowing magic meant for someone else and the pain of dying again and again.

In a room full of people, across all spectrums of the living--alive, near death experience, reborn, and undead--he was the only voice that could tell them anything about Glendower and the lives and death of the forest and he was the only one who couldn’t say anything at all about any of it, couldn’t protect them from it.

Now, more than ever, the lifeline tying him to the earth was pulsing between him and Gansey, molten despair in his chest with every heartbeat from Gansey. It was a most deserved second chance. Noah knew how much Gansey would do. Him standing in this room with these people because of Glendower was as close to his mission that Noah would ever see until it was all over.

Somewhere in the woods near the Lynch Estate, but not on it, his body decomposed under leaves and dirt and worms. His bones were sinking into the same oblivion that deer bones and coyote bones and rabbit bones do. But everything else about him was burning bright in the face of fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow this one took me forever and I still hate it


	7. Flesh and Blood, But Not Human

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Title from Interview with a Vampire (1994)
> 
> More Body horror in this chapter  
> TW/CW: There's medical needle use towards the end of the chapter

The forest was pitch black by the time Gansey had parked his very noisy, very gaudy, very handsome orange car in the staff parking lot of the furthest park ranger station back into the park. Gansey had explained that there were a few closer to the site he’d found, but the roads had been closed due to construction. It was the same construction that was allowing them to get into this part of the park without fear of being caught, so they couldn’t complain, he explained.

That was bullshit. Adam could definitely complain about tromping through a forest in the dead of night with Blue, a stranger, and a very new...what, lover? Whatever they were, he wanted space to himself to figure it out for himself, which involved not having Blue scope out everything about Ronan. And this Gansey guy was like no one Adam had ever met. Adam kind of hated that he loved it. Normally Adam would avoid people like him at all costs, but Gansey was funny and alluring and he’d told Ronan to put his fangs away three times on the car ride over--which was both funny and alluring because Adam didn’t think anyone else could notice the nearly imperceptible lengthening of his fangs. He was smart and cared about what Adam had to say, even once he’d gotten his fill of werewolf primary sources. He needed additional space to figure out what he was feeling about Gansey too.

A falcon screeched overhead and Adam looked warily up into the trees. As night fell, the park got quieter, but Adam was well acquainted with the animals that emerged in the night. Ronan’s hand tightened on the back of Adam’s neck and the werewolf relaxed slightly.

“Are you ready?” Ronan asked, glancing over at him.

Adam shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be? It’s just another shift.”

“I meant about the dead king.”

Adam tried to stretch his psychic feelers, but Blue was right. The forest was too saturated to feel anything in particular, and the promise of a shift had sent his mind into a spiral hours ago. The only thing he wanted to focus on was the rumbling of the wolf right under his skin. He was trying to push it off until they got where they were going, but the sun had set over an hour ago already.

“Dead kings mean nothing to me,” Adam said. “But I’m not digging until my paws bleed,” he warned.

Ronan banged the shovel he was carrying against his shoulder. “You’ll have help.”

This was a new concept to Adam.

“How much further, Gansey?” Ronan called.

“Oh, not very far. I stumbled upon it accidentally earlier, so I’ve never come at it from straight on,” Gansey explained. He double checked his map, turned it a few different directions and then nodded. “We’re almost there.”

“You wanna duck into the treeline?” Ronan asked.

“Maybe later, when everyone else heads back to the ranger station,” Adam answered with a wave of his hand.

Ronan snorted and knocked Adam upside the head gently. “I meant to shift without everyone staring at you.”

“Damn, I like my idea better.” Adam grinned at Ronan and got a grin back, all moonlight and sharp edges.

“Get outta here, wolf-boy,” Ronan said, pushing Adam away from the rest of the group.

Adam made sure to bury his teeth deep this time. He didn’t want anyone stumbling on them during the next boy scout hike. When he came back out of the trees, Ronan reached down and combed his fingers through the fur on Adam’s back, which made Adam skin erupt in goosebumps. Ronan stowed his clothes in the bag on his back.

“No way!” Gansey said, a few minutes later when he’d turned to check on Ronan and Adam. He squatted down in front of Adam and held out his hand hesitantly. Adam pushed his nose against Gansey’s palm and it started an examination that was half pet session. “You’re so big!” Gansey said, holding his hand flat against the broadest part of Adam’s head and then running his hands over Adam’s neck. “You look so cool! It’s crazy how you look the same. I mean, I can tell you’re you, right?”

“It’s either Adam or you found the world’s friendliest werewolf,” Blue said. “You all need more magic in your life, this isn’t even that special.” Still, she scratched Adam behind the ears as she walked by him.

Adam liked the attention, and receiving it as a wolf was worlds less embarrassing than someone doting on him as a human, so it was really a win-win situation, as much as one could win in the middle of a forest in the dead of night surrounded by magical strangers.

“Hey, rich-boy, is this the place?!” Blue called, drawing Gansey’s attention away from Adam and sending all three of them over to her.

It was a beautiful clearing and the magic hit Adam straight in the nose. Even without Gansey’s eager nodding and rapid-fire explanations, Adam knew this was the place. He put his nose to the ground and sniffed in a spiral until he found the most potent spot. Theme he began to dig.

At first, it felt like he was getting nowhere. The ground was soft with moss and peat and early season-change leaf fall. For as much as his paws worked, more loose dirt and soil fell back in. But eventually he hit packed earth and he was able to get some traction for his work. When the hole got too deep for him to reach further, Ronan started to dig next to him and Adam switched to the other side of the hole to even it out.

They worked in easy tandem, neither of them tiring the way Blue or Gansey would, which left plenty of them for those two to chatter with each other.

“Glendower is a Welsh king on par with Arthur,” Gansey explained. “He’ll come back when Wales needs him most.”

“And you think that relates to you because?”

“I don’t. It’s interesting. I’ve had similar doubts. Wales is fairly secure right now, all things considered and there is an awful lot of time left in my life for that to change.”

“You don’t know how much time is left in your life,” Blue said.

“Well, of course not. But statistically speaking, there’s plenty of time left. So I could be pushing this all too early,” Gansey continued. “But when I died, the voice from beyond didn’t mention the reincarnation of Glendower. It just...created the connection between us.”

“Is it a connection you can feel?” Blue asked.

“Yes. It’s like...like a string of fate. I can feel it pulling me towards Glendower all the time.”

“What if you’re the reincarnation?” Ronan asked, leaning his forearm on the handle of his shovel while Adam took a moment to lay down and breathe.

Gansey hummed. “I don’t think so. It’s not that kind of connection. And Blue hasn’t said anything about magic connected to me.”

“I said there’s lots of magic around all of us,” Blue corrected. “I’d need to get you alone, somewhere not here.”

Ronan wolf-whistled and Adam’s ears pricked up for a moment while he tamped down the canine urge to go towards the sound.

“So what if we find the tomb, but it’s empty? Or just has a normal skeleton?” Blue asked.

“There has to be more to it than that. The magic, the energy, all of the maps, other people have felt it too. They’ve been here. The magic creatures are here.”

“I haven’t seen any deer,” Ronan said.

“There’s something special here,” Gansey said. It was final. It was true because Gansey said it. He had that kind of power over the world.

Finally Adam’s paws hit stone that wasn’t rock. He ran circles on top of the lid until Ronan jumped into the gaping grave they’d made. Unearthed?

“Can you dig out some space for me to work next to it?” the vampire asked, curling his long, tawny oak fingers into the soil to dig himself. Adam worked on clearing the dirt away from the edge of the tomb and soon they had a small trench dug around the tomb and Ronan was able to kick his way next to the coffin. Adam jumped out of the grave and paced around the edge, watching Ronan work the heavy stone thing free of the mud and roots until he could get his hands under it and haul it over his head, throwing it to ground level.

“Ronan! You god among men!” Gansey cried and immediately began to circle around the burial box slowly. His fingers flexed at his sides and his eyes were as intense behind his gold glasses as Adama had ever seen them. Gansey sometimes reached out to touch the lid, but would snatch his hand away at the last moment. It was like he was waiting on something. Or perhaps that he didn’t want to find an answer to what he had been hunting for all this time.

Adam only looked away when Ronan climbed out of the grave, which was a wildly entertaining sight if only because Adam was imagining a million bad vampire movies as he did it, and combed his fingers through the fur at the nape of Adam’s neck. He pressed himself up against ronan’s leg, rubbing his jaw against the rough material of his jeans before walking towards the tomb. Ronan followed after him.

The magic was even heavier, like standing too close to a fire. Whatever was in the box was more than bones. 

“Are you sure you want to do this, Gansey?” Ronan asked.

“Will you…” Gansey started and then stopped. He brought his curled fingers up to his mouth to chew on a knuckle. It was the only undignified thing he’d done since Adam had met him and it made Adam all the more fond of him. “Will you remove the lid?”

Ronan stopped towards the tomb, fingers gracing along the stone edge as he contemplated what he was about to do. Adam wondered what it was like to be undead. Had the rest of his family and friends mourned him? Buried an empty casket? Said prayers over a man disappeared? What was Ronan thinking at the moment as he possibly brought something back from the dead?

Ronan lifted the tomb lid.

Immediately, Adam could tell something was wrong. Every instinct in his body sprang to life like a fire on top of oil. He leapt in front of Ronan and knocked him away and heard Blue tackle Gansey out of the way too.

The magic crashed into Adam’s body, digging under his pelt like glass trying to slice him into a million pieces. He gasped for air as the magic warred with his own magic, choking him out and clouding his eyes until he couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.

“A curse, a curse!” Blue cried as Adam finally lost control of his body.

Ronan sprang to his knees, crawling through the leaves and debris back to Adam’s side. He looked like a nightmare, shifting rapidly, stuck between wolf and man.

One moment, there was an exposed spine, white and long in the moonlight.

The next his legs were broken and bent and half paw. 

The next, claws grew out of his palms, tracking blood and gore with them.

Still yet fur tore open his skin, leaving gaping holes down to crawling muscle and breaking bone.

“What the fuck is happening?” he shouted, looking up to Blue. She looked wild and scared and she shrugged while they all looked on helplessly until Adam finally stopped shifting. He was shivering and pale and human, but he wasn’t sitting up. “Adam?” Ronan said, reaching over to shake his shoulder.

Adam’s eyes drifted open but when his lips parted to answer, blood flooded out of his mouth onto the leaves below. Ronan’s eyes tracked down to his clutched fingers and finally saw that, cupped gently in his hands, was his own beating heart.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Gansey breathed, finding the ghastly sight only a moment later.

“Oh my God. Adam, Adam,” Blue said, quickly dropping to her knees by Adam’s head. His eyes tried to track her but they ended up falling shut instead. He was getting greyer by the second. “Do you have your wolfsbane shot? Did you bring it?” she asked. “God, it’s probably in his car. How fast can we get back to the house?” she asked Gansey.

He shrugged helplessly.

“I have it,” Ronan said and scrambled back for the backpack he’d lost in the woosh of magic and tumbling down with Adam. He dragged it back over and dug through the front pocket until he produced the needle. “He told me to keep it on me when he was shifting,” he defended at their surprised looks. “Just do something!”

“Isn’t this going to hurt him?” Gansey asked.

“It’ll force a shift back,” Blue explained. “I’m not going to give him all of it, just enough to shock his system. He’ll need a second shock that causes him to shift again. Can you bite him?” 

It took Ronan too long to realize she was asking him. He only noticed because Adam moaned a denial and shook his head. “We have no idea what that would do to him.”

“It doesn’t matter. We can’t know if he’s whole again until he shifts back and he can’t do that in this state. If we leave him alone, if he’s hurt, he’ll bleed out. Will you do it?” Blue’s face was stern and serious as she held a hand against Adam’s clammy cheek and squeezed his wrist with the other.

“Fuck. Yes,” Ronan growled finally. The shock of red in Adam’s hands was nothing Ronan could argue with.

Blue pressed the needle into Adam’s elbow and injected only a milliliter or two of the wolfsbane. Immediately, Adam started convulsing again, violently shifting back into a wolf. Suddenly Gansey’s arm was in the mix, pressed over his chest as Adam thrashed and slashed at the air. Ronan watched Gansey cringe and hiss as claws found skin but he didn’t let go of Adam’s heart. By the time Adam was a crumpled heap of fur and fang again, Ronan couldn’t tell how much of the blood on Gansey’s arm was his and how much was Adam’s.

“Ronan, now. We don’t have time,” Blue said as Gansey wiped his hand off on his khakis.

Ronan stared at Adam, who was still half unconscious and near delirious, if his rolling eyes were anything to go by. Adam shook his head again, as much as he could, but Ronan leaned down to find a part of his body to sink his teeth into. He didn’t need to fret long because the wolf was melting away beneath him without any biting necessary. Suddenly, and far less violently, Adam laid in the leaves. His hands were still folded against his chest.

When Ronan reached for one, Adam’s fingers opened and there was nothing in them.

“Fuck,” he breathed and pulled Adam into his arms. “We’ve got to get to the ranger station,” he said to Gansey.

Gansey glanced at the tomb but nodded. “He’ll need water. And a soft spot to rest. Who knows what kind of physical trauma he went through.”

“It’s worse the mornings after,” Ronan agreed. “We won’t know the damage until then.”

“At least he isn’t bleeding,” Blue said. To Gansey, she added, “We’ll come back. We have to. That magic needs to be examined and contained again.”

“I think that’s going to be a problem,” Gansey said and gestured to the tomb. The lid was across the clearing so all of them could see that the coffin was empty, gogues left in the stone the only suggestion that something had ever been in it.

“Fuck,” Blue said.

  
  


Adam woke up in a dim room and it felt like he was on fire. As he fought to break the surface tension of consciousness, he thought he was in the trailer again and he’d fallen asleep too close to a space heater. He was certainly in enough pain to be at the trailer again.

But this smelt nothing like the trailer and the aches were too much for even his father. His fingers flexed across the blanket that was over him and immediately something cold was in them. He wanted to open his eyes, but it felt like there was sand and glass living under his eyelids and even just the thought of moving them made his body protest. He tried to curl his fingers around whatever was in his hand, but his fingers felt so far away from his brain, and his elbow and shoulder hurt too much to relay the information anyway.

Whatever was in his hand slipped away and a moment later, something cool was pressed to his lips. Something warm and liquid dripped into his mouth, splashing on his teeth and hitting the back of his mouth and throat. He couldn’t convince his lips to close around whatever it was, and the heady high that came with whatever he was drinking only made the exhaustion pull at him that much stronger.

Fingers pushed through his hair and pressed against his cheek before Adam gave in to sleep again.

  
  


The next time, consciousness was easier to push through. His eyes were still burning, but he was able to force them open. The world was unbearably blurry and it took long to start settling into something like normal. In his hand, Ronan’s skin had warmed to something like human.

Adam turned to look at him a little better and gasped at the rush of pain that greeted him. Ronan went from asleep to standing with a hand pressed over Adam’s shoulder before Adam realized what was happening.

“Don’t move,” Ronan said. “Your bones are so brittle they’ve creaked every time you’ve breathed.” He hooked his foot around the chair he’d been sitting in and pulled it closer to the cot Adam was laid out in.

“Where are we?” Adam asked. His mouth felt like something had died in it. Worse than that. He was pretty used to things dying in his mouth. It’s like his mouth had died. 

“The ranger station. You were too unstable to move. That’s what Blue and Gansey decided. Apparently Gansey has enough medical training for this gig that he felt confident enough to diagnose a werewolf.”

Adam tried to offer a soft grin, but he was pretty sure it came out more as a grimace. “What time is it?”

Ronan reached over to push his fingers through Adam’s hair, which had Adam relaxing back into the bed. “It’s mid-afternoon. But you’ve been out for almost three days.”

“Three days?!” Adam would’ve shouted if his lungs hadn’t seized up at the idea of taking a deep breath.

“You have no idea what you went through, Adam,” Ronan said. There was a hard edge to his voice that Adam wasn’t used to and the thought that it might be directed at him made Adam want to flinch back. But he saw the hurt look on his face too and knew Ronan’s frustration or anger or overwhelmed-ness wasn’t his fault. “You shouldn’t even be alive. Three days is nothing compared to an eternity.” Ronan sank back into his chair and pressed his forehead against Adam’s arm, fingers rubbing over Adam’s hand still.

“Did you guys go back?” Adam asked. “What was in the tomb?” He didn’t want to think about his own brush with mortality . It seemed like every other day recently he was flirting with death. Talking about anything else was preferable to talking about whatever had happened to him.

Ronan looked up at him, a little wild eyed and disbelieving. “No. I haven’t left this fucking building,” he said. “And Gansey and Blue had to go make arrangements to keep his coworkers out of here.” After taking a moment to calm down, he waved his hand dismissively. “They went back once. But there was nothing in it by the time we were done with you.”

“That’s probably not any good,” Adam mused softly. He let his eyes fall shut again.

“Adam, there’s something else,” Ronan said. Adam groggily opened his eyes again. “Your friend… Blue was trying everything to keep you alive. And she suggested something. It worked. Or, it has so far anyway. But we don’t know what it’s going to do to you.”

Adam frowned and forced some of the fogginess in his brain to clear. “What do you mean? What did she do? The wolfsbane is fine the way she did it. I’ve seen her family do it to other wolves.”

“No, not the wolfsbane. We used that to make you shift. This was to keep you alive.” He held out his arm. One of the scars from his nightmare was torn open again, scabbed bright red with renewed pink in the scar.

Adam frowned harder, or at least it felt like he did. “What did you do?” he asked.

“When my nightmare attacked me, I bled for real. Not the kind of ichor shit you saw with Kavinsky. I bruise here like normal. I bleed like normal. And I...gave you some of it.”

Adam’s eyes widened and he wanted to sit up and argue again but he still couldn’t. “What does that mean?”

“It means I made you drink vampire blood. But it’s not really vampire blood!” he defended quickly. “It’s just...my blood.”

“Am I going to turn into a vampire-werewolf?” Adam asked, voice choked, lungs protesting.

“No, there’s no sign of you turning. I would’ve stopped immediately if I thought there’d have been. I was careful about it.”

“Jesus,” Adam groaned. He tried to bring his free hand up to his face but cringed and hissed in pain before his hand even got level with his chest.

“Adam, you were so broken,” Ronan said quietly. It was entirely unlike anything Adam had ever heard from him. “I was so fucking scared. I was willing to try anything, no matter the consequences.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Adam said.

“You weren’t exactly in a position to talk me out of it.”

Adam huffed an irritated sound and turned his gaze to the wall opposite Ronan. He didn’t remember most of what happened after the curse hit him. Based on the amount of pain he was in, the new scars littering what was exposed of his body, and the pervasive bruising making him a prime victim for a purple-people eater, he knew it couldn’t have been anything he could argue his way out of. So he’d sulk instead.

“You need to sleep more,” Ronan finally sighed, standing again and brushing his fingers through Adam’s hair again. It was the one thing that didn’t hurt, so Adam leaned into it. “Gansey said people should stay away through the rest of the week, so you can pass out for real again.”

“You were going to bite me,” Adam said suddenly, fighting to keep his eyes open and on Ronan.

Ronan glanced at him and nodded. “Your friend thought it would shock you into changing back. I don’t know why. I didn’t, before you freak out about that too.”

“I know you didn’t. I made myself change before you could. It would’ve hurt you.”

“Kavinsky bit his wolf.”

“He bit one in human form. And there’s still something not right about that whole thing.” But Adam’s brain was too hot and swollen to think about it for too long. “I wasn’t going to let you hurt yourself for me.”

“But you can jump in front of a curse for me?” Ronan asked drily.

Adam didn’t have an answer for that, so he closed his eyes and fell asleep nearly immediately.

When he woke the next time, briefly, Ronan was pressed along the length of his body, arms around him like he could keep Adam still, face pressed against Adam’s neck. It didn’t send a wave of panic through Adam. Instead, he noticed how Ronan wasn’t even pretending to breathe. He was just truly asleep. Adam turned to press his forehead to Ronan’s, noses pressing together, and fell asleep again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW/CW recap: Adam is given an injection of wolfsbane to force him to shift back to a wolf after being hit by a curse
> 
> i'M gOnNa HaVe ThIs DoNe By HaLlOwEen 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

**Author's Note:**

> Find me and my other monsters on tumblr [here](https://abarbaricyalp.tumblr.com/)


End file.
